Charlotte Brontë at home

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BY MARION HARLAND

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studies of me Home-Life of
Certain Writers arvd Thini^ers

CHARLOTTE BRONTE

CHARLOTTE BRONTE

Charlotte Bronte

AT HOME

BY

MARION HARLANDc/^^-^^^^j

[OR OF "SOME COLONIAL HOMESTEADS AND THEIR
STORIES," "where GHOSTS WALK," ETC.

., if

ILLUSTRATED

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
NEW YORK AND LONDON

ttbc IftnlcFjerbocftei: ipreas

iSgg

/\» \'bOK%\

Copyright, iSgg

BY

G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS
Entered at Stationers' Hall, London

Zbc Tinfclierboclter press, mew H^ocft

To

THE REVEREND J. WADE

for thirty-seven years incumbent of haworth

in cordial appreciation of the unfailing courtesy and

kindly aid extended by him to the american stranger

within his gates

This Volume is
Gratefully Dedicated

PREFATORY

THIS simple narrative of the domestic
life of Charlotte Bronte is as careful
and patient as conscience and affection could
make it. When practicable, I verified by
personal investigation what 1 had heard and
read. When dependent upon information
received from others, I consulted what
seemed to me the ablest authorities upon a
subject which has been treated by many,
with more or less skill.

To no other published work upon the
Bronte family am 1 so much indebted as to
the most interesting volume latelyi issued
by Professor Clement K. Shorter under the
title of Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle. It
is candid, scholarly, and comprehensive,
and to it my final appeal was made when
other biographers differed as to leading
facts, or were confusing in details. It has
taken its place — and will hold it — as a

VI

Prefatory

standard cla'ssic in whatever pertains to the
life-story of a great woman.

My grateful acknowledgments are here-
with offered to the Reverend J. Wade, late
of Haworth Rectory; to Mr. Richard Hewitt
of Bradford, England, and to Mrs. Mary N.
StuU of Iowa City (la.), the faithful aman-
uensis of her aged mother, Mrs. Newsome,
formerly Sarah De Garrs.

Marion Harland.

SUNNYBANK, PoMPTON, N. J.

28

CONTENTS

HAPTER PAGE

I. BIRTH AT THORNTON — REMOVAL TO

HAWORTH .... I

II. THE SIX BABIES IN HAWORTH PAR-

SONAGE . . -14

III. MRS. BRONTE'S DEATH — MISS BRAN-

WELL — children's HOME EDUCA
TION ....

IV. SCHOOL LIFE AT COWAN BRIDGE . 41

V. DEATHS OF MARIA AND ELIZABETH
—MARIA'S SUCCESSOR — FIRESIDE
CONCLAVES . 54

VI. MISS WOOLER'S SCHOOL — MARY

TAYLOR AND ELLEN NUSSEY . 66

VII. HOME AGAIN — BROTHER AND SIS
TERS

VIII. EMILY BRONTE— CHARLOTTE'S GOV-
ERNESS-SHIP . • -97
vii

82

viii Contents

CHAPTER PAGE

IX. DEWSBURY MOOR — FIRST OFFER OF

MARRIAGE . . . -114

X. VARIOUS SCHOOL PROJECTS — "GO-
ING TO BRUSSELS " — LIFE IN THE
PENSIONNAT OF M. AND MADAME
HEGER ... I2Q

XI. MISS BRANWELL'S will — SOME OF
BRANWELL'S FAILURES — CHAR-
LOTTE'S SECOND YEAR IN BRUS-
SELS — MONSIEUR HEGER AND
CHARLOTTE BRONTE . 147

XII. SCHEME OF HOME-SCHOOL ABAN-
DONED — BRANWELL'S RETURN
HOME — HIS "SHAMEFUL STORY"
AND DOWNWARD COURSE . . 163

XIII. STILL-BORN VOLUME OF VERSE —

"THE PROFESSOR" REJECTED —
OPERATION UPON MR. BRONTES
EYES — GREAT SUCCESS OF "JANE
EYRE " — HURRIED TRIP TO LON-
DON 183

XIV. BRANWELL'S DEATH — EMILY'S ILL-

NESS AND DEATH — A "DREARY
CALM " . . . . .199

Contents ix

CHAPTER PAGE

XV. "SLOW DARK MARCH OF THE days"

ANNE'S decline — HER DEATH

AND BURIAL AT SCARBORO' —
charlotte's RETURN HOME —
"SHIRLEY" . . . 212

XVI. MR. JAMES TAYLOR AND HIS REJEC-
TED ADDRESSES — VISIT TO' ANNE'S
GRAVE — " VILLETTE " WRITTEN
— ANOTHER NOTABLE SUCCESS . 227

XVII. MR. NICHOLLS THE MAN AND HIS

WOOING . . 240

XVIIl. MARRIAGE — MARRIED LIFE — ILLNESS

AND DEATH . . 259

XIX. THE HA WORTH OF TO-DAY . . 279

ILLUSTRATIONS

CHARLOTTE BRONTE . Frontispiece

HOUSE IN THORNTON IN WHICH CHAR-
LOTTE BRONTE WAS BORN . 6

RUINS OF BELL CHAPEL IN THORNTON lO

HAWORTH CHURCH, BEFORE RESTORA-
TION ... . . 66

HAWORTH PARSONAGE, BEFORE IT WAS

ALTERED 88

BRONTE GROUP I '8

From a painting by Branwell Bronte.

REV. PATRICK BRONTE . . . l66

From a photograph.

BRANWELL BRONTE . . . . l8o

From a drawing by Miss E. Taylor.

ELLEN NUSSEY (aT THE AGE OF 6^) . 224
From a drawing by Miss E. Taylor.

REV. ARTHUR BELL NICHOLLS . - 2^6

From a drawing by Miss E. Taylor.
xi

CHARLOTTE BRONTE
AT HOME

CHAPTER I

BIRTH AT THORNTON — REMOVAL TO
HAWORTH

OUR England is a bonnie island, and
Yorkshire is one of her bonniest
nooks."

The sentence is put by Charlotte Bronte
into the mouth of Shirley, the piquante
heroine of the novel bearing that name.

The country town of Thornton in the
county of Yorkshire could not have been
in the writer's mind when she wrote the
encomium. It straggles vaguely over wind-
swept hills, green in summer, but from
which the bleakness associated with tree-
less sides and gloomy brows never departs.

2 Charlotte Bronte at Home

The best of the houses are mere cottages,
many little better than peasants' cabins ; all
are of stone, quarried from neighbouring
hills, and stained black by fogs and rains.
In the days antedating railways, Thorn-
ton was a large hamlet, one third the size
of the present place. A thin line of houses
extended to what was known as the "Old
Denholme Road." This cut at right an-
gles the broader and more level highway to
the manufacturing city of Bradford. Other
steep cross streets have laid themselves out
parallel with the Denholme Road, and are,
even now, adorned on washing-day with
lines of wet clothes, stretched quite across
the thoroughfare [?] from opposite second-
storey windows. The heavy-laden ropes
droop so low that no vehicles, except hand-
barrows, can pass beneath. The univers-
ality of the custom argues neighbourly
good-will, a spirit of accommodation to
circumstances, and generous faith in the
amiability of carters and cabmen, who never
interfere with the routine of domestic du-
ties. Loud-voiced, bare-armed women,
their petticoats kilted high above bare or
broganed feet, clack socially together
while hanging out the dripping linen, and

Thornton 3

rail in unison at children playing hide-and-
seek among the flapping "wash."

Dante speaks of an old man whom Death
had forgotten to strike. Progress has over-
looked this one of Yorkshire's nooks. The
whistle of the locomotive tearing onward,
between the inhospitable hills, to Bradford
and Leeds, dies into shrill sighs in valleys
dotted with the everlasting stone cottages.
Here and there, in a defile, or upon an easy
slope, towers a tall factory chimney, belch-
ing pitchy smoke, hanging low for nine
months of the year, and showering down
sooty flakes to heighten the sepia effect of
the monotoned landscape.

In 1816, the Rev. Patrick Bronte, late
Curate of Hartshead, a Yorkshire living
near Huddersfield, removed to Thornton
with his wife and two infant children. He
was the son of an Irish farmer and the only
one of the family who received a liberal
education. The name, originally O'Prunty,
was registered in Cambridge by the am-
bitious lad as Branty. By the time he had
taken orders and entered upon his first
curacy in Weatherfield, Essex, he wrote it
Bronte.

"To me it is perfectly clear,'' decides Mr.- Clement

4 Charlotte Bronte at Home

K. Shorter, " that, for the change of name Lord Nelson
was responsible, and that the dukedom of Bronte, which
was conferred upon the great sailor in 1799, suggested
the more ornamental surname. There were no Irish
Brontes in existence before Nelson became Duke of
Bronte."

As a handsome young curate, with plenty
to say for himself, and a graphic way of
saying it, Mr. Bronte had acquired a reput-
ation for gallantry and susceptibility to the
charms of the other sex before he put his
last crop of wild oats into the ground, in
1812, by marrying Maria Branwell, a pretty,
delicate girl from Penzance, in Cornwall. The
two met and fell in love while Miss Bran-
well was on a visit to a Yorkshire uncle.
The marriage took place December 18,
18 12. Each had attained the conventional
age of discretion, Maria Branwell being
twenty-eight, Patrick Bronte thirty-three
years old.

The house in which they lived in Thorn-
ton still stands upon the principal business
street of that village. It is two-storeyed.
Half of what was then the front yard is
covered by a sort of butcher's booth, hardly
worthy of the name of shop, set flush with
the sidewalk. Passing through this we
enter a fair-sized chamber, lighted by a

Home in Thornton 5

single window overlooking the small garden
at the back. A corresponding front window
was closed by the shop. Naked rafters
cross the ceiling, in bold relief. The small
grate in the chimney is the same that took
the chill off the spring air, April 21, 1816,
when Charlotte, the Brontes' third daugh-
ter, was born in the ground-floor chamber.
There are two other rooms on this floor.
A small kitchen is at the back ; out of it
the stairs run directly to the upper storey.
A parlour, of the same size as Mrs. Bronte's
bedroom, adjoins it. Above-stairs are two
chambers of unequal dimensions. That
over the parlour was Mr. Bronte's study,
and, although in order to reach it he had
to. pass through the one spare-chamber in
the humble establishment, he was com-
paratively secluded from the wailings and
rompings of the three babies below. Nurs-
ery there was none, and the parlour, in
which the family took their meals, was
also the sitting-room.

Small as the place is, and unpretending
as was the style of Uving in the retired ham-
let, housewifely tasks and the care of the
trio of children — the eldest, Maria, -being
but three years old when Charlotte was

6 Charlotte Bronte at Home

born— must have been a cruel tax upon
the mother's strength. She had been
brought up in the gentler climate of the
southern coast of England— " where plants
which we in the north call greenhouse
flowers, grow in great profusion, and with-
out any shelter even in winter, and where
the soft, warm air allows the inhabitants
to live pretty constantly in the open air."
Her associates there were her kith and kin
and neighbours whom she had known all
her life, people of a totally different order
from the small shopkeepers, mechanics,
and peasants who composed her husband's
cure of souls.

" Her mind," said her daughter Charlotte
in 1850, "was of a truly fine, pure, and
elevated order." And of the letters written
by Maria Branwell to her lover during the
brief season of their betrothal, — "There is
a rectitude, a refinement, a constancy, a
modesty, a sense, a gentleness about them,
indescribable. I wish she had lived, and
that 1 had known her ! "

"1 am certain," writes Maria to her be-
trothed, less than a fortnight before the
wedding-day, "no one ever loved you
with an affection more pure, constant,

HOUSE IN THORNTON IN WHICH CHARLOTTE BRONTE
WAS BORN

Birth at Thornton 7

tender and ardent than that which I feel.
I long to improve in every religious and
moral quality that 1 may be a help, and, if
possible, an ornament to you." *

Untold myriads of other brides have
thus dreamed, and aspired, and awakened
to the stern realism of every-day married
life, many with a shock that expelled love
with hope. Mrs. Bronte must have dis-
missed the dear desire of being an ornament
to her husband before she lay down, for
the third time in four years, upon her couch
of pain, and brought another weakling girl
into the world.

Baby Charlotte was two months old
when she was presented for baptism (June
29, 181 6) at the font in the Thornton Church.
The building, now a picturesque ruin, is
more interesting to the thoughtful visitor
than the shabby-genteel house in which
Charlotte Bronte was born. The frame of
one fine window is intact in the gable,
which is all that remains of the sacred ed-
ifice beyond the foundations, a crumbling
wall a few feet high, and some memorial-
slabs that once floored the chancel. Until
very lately the font, which appears in our

* Shorter's Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle, page 5 1 .

8 Charlotte Bronte at Home

illustration, was left where it stood when
the baby was baptised by her father's friend
and her mother's cousin-in-law, the Rev.
William Morgan of Bradford. Mr. Morgan
and Jane Fennel! were married on the
same day and hour with Mr. Bronte and
Maria Branwell, Mr. Bronte performing the
ceremony for Miss Fennell and Mr. Morgan,
the latter clergyman returning the favour
by uniting his wife's cousin to Patrick
Bronte. We like to believe that the near
neighbourhood of her cousin — but four miles
distant by the coach-road — tempered, in
some degree, the asperities of life to the
fragile little mistress of Thornton Parson-
age. We choose to imagine, also, that
Jane Fennell may have been in church
on June 29, — perhaps in the capacity of
godmother.

The ruined church and its smarter succes-
sor across the road — to which the weather-
beaten font has been removed — are a full
mile from the Parsonage by way of the
winding highways I have described. As
the Brontes never kept a carriage, the
oft-ailing mother would be an infrequent
attendant upon her robust husband's min-
istrations. Yet her feet must sometimes

Birtli at Thornton 9

have pressed the hoary stones we part
coarse wild grasses to trace, and the
graceful outlines of the window behind
the altar were familiar to meek eyes which
rested upon little else that was beautiful or
inspiring. The churchyard she crossed to
reach the house of prayer, and through
which the Reverend Patrick strode twice
a week during the four years of his Thorn-
ton incumbency, is overgrown with grass,
weeds, and such hardy garden-plants as
southernwood, lavender, and rosemary, in
June, pinks bloom in the crevices of neg-
lected tombs, and English ivy — kindliest
of creepers — drapes the broken walls of
the church. Under the very droppings of
the sanctuary-eaves was buried, over a
century ago, one whose story is thus told:

"Here lyeth the Body of Mr. Accepted
Lister, Minister of the Gospel, who ex-
changed this Frail Life for a Better, Febru-
ary the 2^, lyS/g, Anno Aitatis ^8. He had,
by his abundant Labours, verified his own
Motto, —

" ' Impendam ei Expendar. '

Mr. Bronte was ever a valiant Church-
man. We hope, charitably, that when

10 Charlotte Bronte at Home

called upon to read the Burial Service over
some one of the numerous "family graves"
that are thick on that side of the church,
his falcon gaze rested respectfully, not in
scorn, upon the epitaph of the Puritan Non-
Conformist who wore out his frail body at
thirty-eight in the strenuous endeavour to
live up to his "Motto."

One year and less than a month after
Charlotte's christening, Mrs. Bronte's uncle.
Rev. John Fennell, baptised in Thornton
Church the only son ever born to Patrick
Bronte and Maria, his wife. The child
received his father's Christian name and the
surname of his mother's family, and became,
as Patrick Branwell, the most important per-
sonage of the household in his parents' es-
timation, afterward, and always in his own.

Charlotte's one distinct recollection of her
mother, in after-years, was of a pale little
lady playing with her two-year-old son in
the fire-lighted Haworth parlour, one win-
try evening. There was no reason why
the picture should have stamped itself upon
the childish mind, unless it were that the
occasions were pitifully rare when the
mother had time or spirits for frolicking,
even with her idolised boy.

C 3

Removal to Haworth 1 1

The friendly kinsman, Rev. William Mor-
gan, came to the front again, August 20,
1818, the Sunday on which the Brontes'
fifth child and fourth daughter received the
name of Emily Jane, in affectionate remem-
brance of Mrs. Morgan, the sister-cousin of
Maria Branwell's girlhood.

By now, it was a matter of course that
the Parson should have a new baby every
year to show to the rural congregation.
The Register of Baptisms in the Parish of
Bradford and Chapelry of Thornton contains
two entries that deviate from the four-year-
old record. Anne Bronte was not offered
for baptism until March 25, 1820, and her
father is set down, not as "Minister of
Thornton," as at Charlotte's christening,
or, as when Emily's turn came, "of Thorn-
ton Parsonage," but as "Minister of
Haworth." He had been appointed to the
living of that place a month or so prior to
Anne's birth.

Mrs. Gaskell thinks the family removal
to Haworth took place in February, 1820.
In that case, the baby would hardly have
been christened in Thornton a month later.
Mrs. Bronte, never strong, was a con-
firmed invalid after Anne's birth, and the

12 Charlotte Bronte at Home

four-mile drive over tlie hills would have
been needless exposure for mother and
child at that inclement season. It v/as
probably later in the spring that comes
coyly, and never early, to that region, that
seven country carts, laden with books,
household and kitchen furniture, creaked
through the one long street of Old Haworth,
the horses tugging uphill all the way, to
the gate of the Parsonage.

Mrs. Gaskell "wonders how the bleak
aspect of her new home — the low, oblong
stone Parsonage, high up, with a still
higher background of sweeping moors —
struck on the gentle, delicate wife."

The impression would have been more
painful but for the middle age of her re-
sidence in Thornton. The wildness of the
latter hamlet was less forbidding than Ha-
worth at that time of the year; still, the
general features of village and country were
the same. The vast moors, stretching out
on all sides and upward, beyond the last
row of stone cottages and the group of
church buildings, were more open to the
searching winds of the North Country than
the inferior heights about Thornton. The
winters might be longer here, and the fogs

Removal to Haworth 1 3

rising from the deeper hollows, heavier.
The Parsonage itself, cheerless though it is
to our eyes, was a decided improvement in
size and convenience upon the cramped
quarters on the business street which Mrs.
Bronte left behind her, while Haworth
Church, venerable in antiquity and in tradi-
tion, represented a better living than the Bell
Chapel of Thornton. The grey old sanctu-
ary, separated by a churchyard as ancient
from the Brontes' new home, occupied a
site consecrated and used as an oratory in
the fourteenth century; the parish was
larger and richer than either of the other
livings Mr. Bronte had held, and was rated
as a desirable position by the rural clergy.

It may, then, have been with a lighter,
not a heavier, spirit that the mother entered
her new abode, and gathered her six babies
about the hearthstone in the parlour — the
parlour that was to be the living-room of
the family for the rest of their mortal lives,
and the birth-chamber of the immortal
books which have made it a shrine to a
million pilgrims

CHAPTER II

THE SIX BABIES IN HAWORTH PARSONAGE

HAWORTH PARSONAGE, as all the
reading world knows, stands upon
higher ground than the church. A tiny door-
yard is in front, divided from the burying-
ground by a brick wall. Behind are fields
sloping upward to the rolling moors. The
graveyard lies upon the front and one end
of the dwelling, and, on the upper gable-
end, is higher than the house grounds,
suggesting gruesome thoughts as to the
quality of the water drained into the well
for cooking and drinking purposes. There
are four rooms upon the first floor, with a
central hall. The apartment at the right of
the front door was assigned at once to Mr.
Bronte as a study. Back of it, but with no
communicating door, was the kitchen, it
had one window, and a rear door giving
14

The Six Babies 15

upon the yard. Opposite the study was
the parlour. This was the family eating-
room, and they had no other place in
which to receive visitors. Next to this,
and across the hall from the kitchen, was a
storeroom. Mr. Bronte's bedchamber was
directly above the study, and as declining
health soon compelled his wife to have a
separate sleeping-room, she took that over
the parlour. A servants' dormitory above
the storeroom could be warmed by a
grate, if necessary. The nursery was cut
off from the upper front hall. The solitary
window looked upon the graveyard and
the church. There was neither fireplace nor
stove in it. The winter's chill and the spring
dampness must have got into the stone wall
and flagged flooring, and lingered there
until July suns baked the house to its heart.
That was not a luxurious age, and the
children were Yorkshire-born, yet we can-
not hear without a shudder that the six
little things had no other playroom than
this ; that they spent hours of every day,
and most of every stormy day here, busy
with their books and the games invented
by themselves. They had no toys, and no
playfellows outside of the Parsonage.

1 6 Charlotte Bronte at Home

Mrs. Bronte brought to Haworth a young
girl of fourteen or thereabouts, Sarah De
Garrs by name, the daughter of a respect-
able Thornton parishioner, to assist in the
nursery and to accompany the children in
their walks. Although nominally their
nurse, she became at length their play-
mate, friend, and guardian. Mrs. Bronte
sickened visibly that first summer in the
new home, and by the time winter closed
about the moorland Parsonage, was con-
fined to her bed, unable to take the over-
sight of the household, seeing the children
but twice a day, and then for a few
minutes only.

Maria (the original of Helen Burns in
Jane Eyre) was now seven, and the "little
mother " of the band. Her father had taught
her to read, and to think. There were no
juvenile books in his library. He would
have proscribed them if there had been
any. Even after Sarah De Garrs's sister
Nancy was associated with her in the con-
duct of the house, the work was too heavy
to permit the attached nurse to devote
much time to amusing the children. There
was no longer any attempt to disguise the
fatal truth that Mrs. Bronte's malady was

The Six Babies 17

an internal cancer. The seed of the evil was
in the scrofulous humour which developed
with deadly effect in her offspring. It
matters not now how much annual child-
bearing, a sour and sharp climate, overwork,
and narrow means had to do with hasten-
ing the end. She lay in bed all day, suffer-
ing intense pain at times, and so miserably
unnerved that the house must be kept
perfectly quiet when she "had her worst
turns."

1 have had direct from Sarah De Garrs *
the story of one day in the overshadowed
home, a routine laid down and carried out
by the father — for all these months sick-
nurse, tutor, breadwinner, and bread-dis-
penser to the little flock already virtually
motherless.

The six children, always neatly dressed
by their nurse, met their father in his study
for morning prayers, and, these over, ac-
companied him across the hall to breakfast.
The fare was plain, but abundant, — porridge
and milk, bread and butter, for the morning
meal seven days in the week. The furni-
ture of the parlour was scanty, yet well
kept. The grate was economically contrived
* Now Mrs. Newsome of Iowa City.

1 8 Charlotte Bronte at Home

to burn the least quantity of coals consistent
with enough warmth to save the occupants
of the room from actual suffering; there
were two small windows, both looking
toward the burial-ground. Mr. Bronte
discouraged table-talk, — for a while, lest the
clamour of tongues might break the quiet
of the sick-room overhead ; after Mrs.
Bronte's death, because his digestion had
been damaged seriously by night-watching
and irregular meals snatched in the inter-
vals of trying offices there was nobody but
the husband to perform.

" He was very attentive and affectionate
to his invalid wife," Mrs. Newsome as-
severates, once and again. "I am certain
she had no fear — as many would construe
the word — of her husband. Only a loving
wife's fear of offending him."

"He was not naturally fond of children,"
Mrs. Gaskell remarks in this connection,
"and felt their frequent appearance on the
scene as a drag, both on his wife's strength
and as an interruption to the comfort of
the household."

He deserved, then, the more credit for
the systematic, and, in the main, the wise
ordering of their daily hving when they

The Six Babies 19

were thus committed entirely to tiis care.
Maria, Elizabetli, Charlotte, Branwell, and
Emily followed him to the study after
breakfast. Baby Anne remaining with the
nurse.

Mr. Bronte was a scholarly man, with fine
literary tastes, himself the author of several
books, none of which attracted much atten-
tion when published. All of them have long
been out of print. A volume of Cottage
Poems and The Rural Minstrel were writ-
ten before his marriage; two religious
novels, some pamphlets upon churchly
themes, and a couple of sermons, afterward.

" Many a prolific writer of the day passes
muster as a genius among his contempora-
ries upon as small a talent," says Mr.
Shorter, "and Mr. Bronte does not seem
to have given himself any airs as an author."

It is doubtful if he ever spoke of the
short-lived publications to his children.
The education of his home-class was begun
and continued along lines of his own de-
vising, and was, like most of his ideas,
original in conception and vigorous in
practice. Maria, at seven, read political
leaders aloud to her father, discussed poli-
tics with him in his study, and expounded

20 Charlotte Bronte at Home

them at length to her juniors, when in
any other nursery in Christendom they
would have been lisping Three Little
Pigs Went to Market, and making round,
pitiful eyes over The Babes in the Wood.
For text-books the pupils had such manuals
and helps to learning as the father had used
in preparing himself for Cambridge, sup-
plemented by his inexhaustible memory.

The morning session over, the children
were committed to Sarah De Garrs until
dinner-time. To her patient tutelage the
girls owed much of the skill with the needle
which was remarkable with each at a very
tender age. At five, Charlotte's wee fingers
made a linen chemise for her own wear,
with no other help than the cutting and
basting done by Sarah.

"Of course," relates the whilom nurse,
"she had been a long while at it, as they
only sewed an hour each afternoon. But
it was clean and well done. Charlotte was
always a thoughtful, neat, womanly child."

When the chemise was finished, and the
basting-threads withdrawn, Sarah led the
little seamstress into her mother's chamber
to exhibit her handiwork.

The suggested scene is interesting, and

The Six Babies 2 1

falls in well with the scheme of Charlotte
Bronte's unique life-history. She was al-
ways small for her age, quiet in speech,
and noiseless in her motions, reminding be-
holders of a timid, bright-eyed bird. In
"Mamma's room " she would glide like a
shadow, and have to stand on tiptoe to
hold up the small garment for the bed-
ridden judge's inspection.

When comparatively free from pain, Mrs.
Bronte found entertainment in all that went
on within the strait confines of her prison,
asking her nurse to raise her among the
pillows that she might see the grate pol-
ished, "as it used to be done in Cornwall,"
— in the far-off Penzance she had never seen
since she left its bland airs and perpetual
flowering for the eventful visit to the John
Fennells in 1812.

She would be sure to magnify Charlotte's
visit and achievement into an event, taking
the scrap of linen in her wasted hands,
and feigning critical examination of seam,
and gusset, and band. Then would follow
words of praise in the weak voice that
never lost its sweet southern intonations,
and the kiss that fully rewarded the little
one for the " long while' the task was in

22 Charlotte Bronte at Home

doing, and the pains it had cost her to keep
it clean.

The children dined with their father.
Little meat was served to them, and that
little was plain roast or boiled. Mr.
Bronte's Irish prejudices and habits inclined
him to restrict their diet almost entirely to
potatoes and milk for the noon meal. For
sweets there were bread- and rice-pud-
dings, custards, and other preparations of
eggs and milk, slightly sweetened. Pastry
and rich puddings were unknown quanti-
ties in the family bill-of-fare.

The afternoons spent by Mr. Bronte in
parish visiting were the children's happiest
seasons. Unless the weather were actually
tempestuous, they donned hats and coats
and took the uphill path to the breezy
downs, accompanied by Sarah De Garrs.

"My sister Emily loved the moors,"
wrote Charlotte in her womanhood.
"Flowers brighter than the rose bloomed
in the blackest of the heath for her. Out
of a sullen hollow in a livid hillside, her
mind could make an Eden. "

For " Emily," read "the Bronte children."
The sweep and wide reaches of the uncul-
tivated tracts billowing against the sky,

The Six Babies 23

the clouds that made the heath black, the
sunlight that glorified the livid hillsides,
— were their universe. Once beyond the
Parsonage fields and environing cottages,
their repressed spirits broke forth.

"Their afternoon walks, as they sallied
forth, each neatly and comfortably clad,
were a joy. Their fun knew no bounds,"
says the affectionate nurse. " It never was
expressed wildly. Bright and often dry,
but deep, it occasioned many a merry burst
of laughter. They enjoyed a game of
romps, and played with zest."

They knew every bird by sight and
name, and the habitat and properties of
every plant growing wild in their beloved
solitudes. The change of seasons was
reckoned by the budding, the blooming,
and the blighting of the heather. The
passionate love of Nature, in her sombre,
and in her blithe moods, that makes Char-
lotte's slightest descriptive sketch of moon-
rise, or sunset, or rain-storm perfect in
drawing and in col6ur, was fostered by
face-to-face communion with the Mighty
IVlother.

Strolling reluctantly homeward as pru-
dent Sarah detected the creeping of evening

24 Charlotte Bronte at Home

shadows and chill from the valleys, they
found tea awaiting them, in the kitchen,
if the weather were cold, in the long sum-
mer evenings, in the parlour. Mr. Bronte
came in later and tea was served in his
study. He assembled the children about
the table in the parlour when the tea-tray
was taken off, for recitation and talk, giv-
ing them oral lessons in history, biography,
or travel, while the little girls plied their
needles. The story told in the evening
was to be written down, or repeated to
him as part of the morrow's lesson.

The uneventful day was closed by a short
visit to their mother's room. While she
could listen to them, the little ones said
their nightly prayers at her bedside, kissed
her "good-night," and stole away softly
to "warm, clean beds," as Sarah De Garrs
is careful to specify.

To the close of his long life, Mr. Bronte
was more the soldier than the divine. He
carried his martinet system of work and
recreation into the minutest detail of parish
and family duties. Method, law, obedience,
were his watchwords. It was an age of
educational "fads." La Nouvelle Heloise
and English Sandford and Merlon had put

The Six Babies 25

new ideas into the minds of parents and
instructors. Witii the Vicar of Haworth
idea leaped into action at birth. The word
"heredity" had not been coined then, but
he had a certain belief in blood, and in the
influence of descent upon the growing child.
He believed, with all his rugged strength,
in environment, and he made it for his
young family. Walls of impassable reserve
were raised between them and the people
of their own caste within a radius of twenty
miles who might, otherwise, have made
overtures of sociability to the Parsonage.

Mrs. Bronte's ill-health sufficed, while
she lived, to excuse the lack of neighbour-
liness. By the time she died the household
habits were fixed; the father's views began
to be comprehended, and, 1 need not say,
to be resented. The sort of Swiss Family
Robinson colony set up in the old grey
house at the top of the churchyard was an
obnoxious novelty to Yorkshire squire and
dame. It was less tolerable to their notions
of congruity and civility because artisans
and day-labourers approved of "a parson
who minded his own business and did n't
meddle with theirs," and his children were
trained to speak politely and kindly to

26 Charlotte Bronte at Home

their humble neighbours when they chanced
to meet them.

Nothing surprised me more in my inter-
course with those of Mr. Bronte's cottage
parishioners who recollect him well, than
the genuine liking for him expressed by
them all. Grey-headed Saturday night
loungers in the " Black Bull " tap-room vie
with one another in relating stories of his
"jolly ways " and his freedom from offens-
ive pride. How he stopped on his way to
church to laugh at a fight his dog got into
with a vicious tramp cur, and " wor main
sorry he cud na' stay to see it oot. He
wor sure his dawg wad get the best o't."
How he could call by name everybody he
met in his long tramps over hill and dale,
if he or she were his parishioner, and
never forgot to ask after ailing wife or
child. How he would walk fifteen miles
in the teeth of snow or sleet, to "get him-
self into a glow-loike," and "care nought
for his wet coat and frozen breeches." All
agree that "the family kep' theirselves
verra close. As indeed they had a roight
to do, if they loiked."

Sarah De Garrs's emphatic declaration
that "Mr. Bronte was at all times a gen-

The Six Babies 27

flenmii, never showing temper in the
least, tender in the sick-room and kind
to his children " — confirms the impressions
gained from tap-room and cottage gossip,
to wit, that the popular verdict upon the
eccentric recluse (in which I had heretofore
heartily acquiesced) may have been one-
sided and unjust.

"He never gave me an angry word !"
is one of the three recorded sayings of his
devoted wife.

Her love and his daughter's steadfast
filial piety may have had more warrant in
his character and behaviour than the major-
ity of the Bronte cult are ready to admit.

CHAPTER III

mrs. bronte's death — miss branwell

children's home education

CHARLOTTE BRONTE was but five
years old when the six children
were led, in solemn ceremony, to their
mother's room to see her die.

The day was September 15, 1821. The
weary agony of the cureless malady had
lasted a year and a half. Yet enough vital-
ity remained in the emaciated frame to
make death a struggle. So hard was it
that, as an eye-witness told me, the knees
were drawn up rigidly against the body,
and could not be straightened when life
was extinct.

She had expressed the wish to her hus-
band that "all the dear faces should be
about her when she died," and the faithful
Sarah carried Baby Anne in her arms when
28

Mrs. Bronte's Death 29

the summons came. The husband did not
leave his post at his wife's pillow until,
as he has inscribed upon her memorial-
stone, " Her soul departed to her Saviour."

Less aptly he added, — " Be ye also ready,
for, in such an hour as ye think not, the
Son of Man cometh. ' '

The long-suffering invalid, "always pa-
tient, cheerful, and pious," had been not
only ready, but expectant of the summons
for many a sleepless night and tortured
day.

The poor body — so wasted that the won-
der was how it had continued to hold the
heroic soul thus long — was laid away under
the pavement of the church. Mr. Bronte,
reticent of sorrow as of all other deep emo-
tions, readjusted the domestic machinery
to move on as if jar and wrench had not
been. Except that the little girls thereafter
slept in the room over the parlour, their
lives were little changed on the surface. To
all but the deep-hearted Maria, — who had
borne a most unchildlike part in the labours
and cares that devolved upon the mistress
of the fast-growing family, — the mother,
when alive, was a shadowy figure, seen
seldom, and then under such restraint of

30 Charlotte Bronte at Home

youthful spirits as cast a mysterious awe
about the large upper chamber and its oc-
cupant. She was soon a shadowy mem-
ory to Charlotte and the other younger
children.

In the pacquet of letters — nine in all —
written by her during her betrothal, pre-
served by the widower, and never showed,
even to her children, for a score of years
after her decease, was an undated MS.
entitled The Advantages of Poverty in Re-
ligious Concerns. Upon the cover Mr.
Bronte had written :

" The above was written by my dear wife,
and is for insertion in one of the religious
periodicals. Keep it as a memorial of her. ' '

We should like to know whether or not
the article was ever offered to any of the
aforesaid religious periodicals, and why it
was not printed. We are yet more inter-
ested in asking when the essay was penned.
Was it at Hartshead, while the young wife
hugged the hope of being an ornament to
her husband } or at Thornton, between the
births that turned the slim family purse in-
side out ? or in intervals separating one
pain-paroxysm from the next, in the con-
secrated "upper chamber" at Haworth .?

Mrs. Bronte's Death 31

Who was the baby in the cradle beside her,
as she pursued a theme she should have
known by heart, if ever author learned
philosophy from experience ?

One day in the autumn or winter suc-
ceeding Mrs. Bronte's death, Charlotte came
to her nurse, wild and white with the ex-
citement of having seen "a fairy ' standing
by Baby Anne's cradle. When the two ran
back to the nursery, Charlotte flying on
ahead, treading softly not to frighten the
beautiful visitant away, no one was there
besides the baby sleeping sweetly in the
depths of her forenoon nap. Charlotte stood
transfixed ; her eyes wandered incredu-
lously around the room.

" But she was here, just now ! " she in-
sisted. " 1 really and truly did see her ! "
— and no argument or coaxing could shake
her from the belief.

In excluding his children from the world
of people and facts, Mr. Bronte drove the
eager minds into the universe of imagina-
tion. When they read or listened to a
story, they forthwith proceeded to act it.
Their "games" were founded upon what
Maria read to them from the newspapers,
and the tales brought forth from the father's

32 Charlotte Bronte at Home

mines of tradition, iiistory, and romance.
Nothing escaped them. Startling melo-
dramas and three-volume tales were con-
structed upon advertisements in the Leeds
Mercury, or a "Personal" in a stray copy
of the Times.

It is pleasant to find their young nurse
cast for important parts in these plays. I
copy, from a MS. dictated by her, the ac-
count of a contretemps that interrupted the
orderly progress of scenic adventure :

" As an escaping Prince, with a counterpane for a
robe, I stepped from a window on the limb of a cherry-
tree, which broke and let me down. There was great
consternation among tlie children, as it was Mr. Bronte's
favourite tree, under which he often sat. 1 carried off the
branch and blackened the place with soot, but the next
day, JVlr. Bronte detained them a moment and began
with the youngest, asking each pleasantly, ' Who
spoiled my tree?' The answer was, 'Not I,' until it
came to my turn. They were always loyal and true."

Apropos of Anne's cradle and Charlotte's
attachment to her nurse, is an anecdote of
her petition to her father, when Anne had
outgrown the little bed, that it should be
sent to Sarah's mother, whose baby " would
just fit it." The request was granted, and
the story is gratefully recollected by the
family who received the gift.

Everyday Duties 33

So passed an uneventful year. The
course of daily duty and recreation was
like clockwork, — prayers, breakfast, les-
sons in the study, the early dinner, the
walks on the moors, the nurse guiding the
baby's steps, and lifting Patrick and Emily
over rough places; tea in the clean, roomy
kitchen; sewing and the informal historical
lecture until bedtime. Of this twelve-
month — her last in the Parsonage — the
aged nurse says, with a savour of loving
jealousy, passing pathetic:

"Their lives were not narrow. They
had the nicest system in all that they
did, and were a very reserved family,
but they found much enjoyment where
others could see none. They were verj>
happy."

Maria was eight on the i6thofMay, 1821,
when she "finished her Sampler." Eliza-
beth finished hers "at the age of seven
years," on the 27th of July. Did the fading
woman, on whose bed they were laid for
inspection as Charlotte's chemise had been,
tell each girl of the more elaborate perform-
ance in cross-stitch, "ended" April 15,
1 79 1, by Maria Bran well, lettered, thread
by thread, with a text she — sweet soul ! —

34 Charlotte Bronte at Home

surely had then, nor ever, occasion to heed
as an admonition ?

" Flee from sin as from a serpent, for if
thou comest too near to it, it will bite thee.
The teeth thereof are as the teeth of a lion
to slay the souls of men.

On rainy days, — and they are many in the
Yorkshire uplands, — and when " Papa was
studying," the "little mother" still gathered
her brood in the room overlooking church-
yard and church tower, and read to them
by the hour in the subdued tones learned
in the months when a sudden laugh
or incautious exclamation might disturb
" Mamma " next door. Not one of the
girls had a doll ! They enacted wars,
and prison-scenes, and heroic adventures
of prince and knight, and fairy-tales — but
they never "played ladies," or had dolls'
tea-parties, or " went visiting" to different
corners of the small room ("the children's
study," as the De Garrs sisters named it),
bedecked with table-covers for cashmere
shawls, and feather-dusters for ostrich-
plumes; never drove a team of chairs lashed
together, or rode horseback sitting side-
ways on the balustrade. What wonder
that they grew up at once demure and un-

Miss Branwell 35

conventional, prim and lawless, shy and
daring ?

We are not told if it were kind busybody,
or a stirring of worldly wisdom in his own
independent spirit, that suggested to Mr.
Bronte the need of other society for his
motherless girls than that of paid employ-
ees, however intelligent and affectionate.
The average widower, thus situated, seeks
to secure fitting associations and guiding
care for the young creatures by a second
marriage. Mr. Bronte, loving his liberty
and his children, sent to Penzance for his
sister-in-law. Miss Elizabeth Branwell, for
whom his wife had named their second
daughter.

Miss Branwell was middle-aged; she was
provincial. Her prejudices, which were
many, had rooted themselves stubbornly in
forty-five years' residence in one place, and
that a country town. The change from
the southlands to the bleak, hilly village
was a formidable plunge for one of her sex
and age. Penzance was always home,
Haworth a foreign country. In her rounds
of the house whose walls and floors were
of stone, and where icy draughts stole in
through cracks in the badly fitting window-

36 Charlotte Bronte at Home

and door-frames, the prudent spinster
wrapped a shawl about ears and shoulders
and shod her feet with iron pattens, the
click of which set her nieces' teeth on edge.
Their father might ignore, or misapprehend,
the protest against Yorkshire barbarities.
They loved their country and their home
too ardently not to feel the significance of
shiver, and shawl, and foot-gear. What-
ever dreams they may have indulged, be-
fore her advent, of motherly love and
sympathy, such as they had never tasted
except in brief and tantalising sips, they
were speedily dissipated by their aunt's
talk and deportment.

Mrs. Bronte, although the youngest, by
several years, of four sisters, was looked up
to by her family as the most promising
member of the Branwell connection. She
intimated this modestly to her lover, prior
to their marriage, regretting "the disad-
vantage of having been for some years
perfectly her own mistress," and saying
how deeply she had "felt the want of a
guide and instructor." Her kinspeople
regarded her as "possessing more than
ordinary talents, which she inherited from
her father." Miss Branwell was sensible.

Miss Branwell 37

commonplace, and practical in the extreme,
without an atom of intellectuality. Judged
by Cornish standards — and she had at fifty
no other — the condition of her brother-in-
law's home was enough to raise the grey-
ing hair under her cap with dismay. She
and Mr. Bronte seem to have hit it off re-
markably well for two people of utterly
dissimilar training, tastes, and habits, each
of whom was irrevocably addicted to his
and her own opinions. She had the true
middle-class Briton's reverence for his pro-
fession, and the British spinsterly respect
for masculinity in the abstract. We hear
of no altercations; each seems to have val-
ued the good qualities of the other; the
widower was profoundly appreciative of
Miss Branwell's notable housewifery and
her honest desire to do her best for his un-
mothered offspring, and his name stood
first among the executors of the will drawn
up by her when she had been an inmate of
the Parsonage for ten years.

The four elder girls were an enigma to
her. They were bashful, they were awk-
ward, they lived in their books, and their
bookish talk was affected gibberish to her.
They had no society and wanted none;

38 Charlotte Bronte at Home

they cared nothing for becoming clothes.
Maria was untidy, and Emily had the eyes
of a half-tamed creature of another race
than the decorous Branwells. All that was
most womanly in the newcomer gathered
about Anne — "the sweet, loving baby"
of Sarah De Garrs's reminiscences. From
the beginning she was the aunt's favourite,
and, by virtue of his handsome face, his sex,
and winning ways, Branwell came next.

The new manager forthwith reorganised
the domestic staff, and, with wise thrift,
cut down expenses wherever it was
practicable. Her activity in this direction
had something to do with Mrs. Gaskell's
allusion in the Life of Charlotte Bronte
to "wasteful young servants," a charge re-
futed by Mr. Bronte's testimonial to their
kindness to his children, their honesty and
carefulness "in regard to food and all other
articles committed to their charge."

Miss Branwell's chamber was a sort of
industrial schoolroom where the four elder
girls were trained in every description of
plain sewing, darning, and knitting. They
had their apprenticeship also in the kitchen
that was a model of neatness and order for
every other in the county. From peeling

Children's Home Education 39

the potatoes that formed so important a
part of their food, to making the family
bread, compounding the far-famed York-
shire tea-cake and oaten scones, cutting up
meat for hash, and cooking broths for sick
cottagers, — her tuition was strict and exact.
She made dainty housewives of them all by
the time Maria was ten and Charlotte seven.
A graphic picture of the group of father
and children at this date occurs in a letter
from Mr. Bronte to Charlotte's friend and
biographer, Mrs. Gaskell. It has been often
quoted, but my story would be incomplete
without it, not only because it exhibits, as
no other narrator has been able to show,
the radical peculiarities of the father's sys-
tem of education, and the characteristics of
each child, already marked, but because it
places the teacher in a more amiable light
than that in which we are generally dis-
posed to regard him.

" When mere children, as soon as they could read
and write, Charlotte and her brother and sisters used to
invent and act little plays of their own, in which the
Duke of Wellington, my daughter Charlotte's hero, was
sure to come off conqueror ; when a dispute would not
infrequently arise amongst them regarding the compara-
tive merits of him, Buonaparte, Hannibal, and Caesar.
When the argument got waim, and rose to its height, as

40 Charlotte Bronte at Home

their mother was dead, I had sometimes to come in as
arbitrator, and settle the dispute according to the best
of my judgment.

"When — as far as 1 can remember — the oldest was
about ten years of age and the youngest about four,
thinking that they l<new more than I had yet discovered,
in order to mal<e them speak witli less timidity, 1 deemed
that if they were put under a sort of cover I inight gain
my end, and, happening to have a mask in the house, I
told them all to stand and speak boldly from under
cover of the mask.

" I began with the youngest (Anne, afterwards Acton
Bell) and asked ' what a child like her most wanted. '
She answered, 'Age and experience.' I asked the next
(Emily, afterwards Ellis Bell) what 1 had best do with
her brother Branwell, who was sometimes a naughty
boy. She answered, ' Reason with him, and when he
won't listen to reason, whip him ! ' 1 asked Branwell
' what was the best way of knowing the difference be-
tween the intellects of man and woman.' He answered,
' By considering the difference between them as to their
bodies. ' 1 then asked Charlotte ' what was the best
book in the world.' She answered, 'The Bible.'
' And what was the next best ? ' She aiiswered, ' The
Book of Nature.' I then asked next ' what was the best
mode of education for a woman.' She answered,
'That which would make her rule her house well.'

"Lastly, 1 asked the oldest (Maria) 'what was the
best mode of spending time.' She answered, ' By lay-
ing it out in preparation for a happy Eternity.'

" I may not have given precisely their words, but I
have nearly done so, as they made a deep and lasting
impression on my memory. The substance, however,
was exactly what 1 have stated."

CHAPTER IV

SCHOOL LIFE AT COWAN BRIDGE

THE winter of 1823-24 brought increase
of care to Miss Branwell, and anxiety
to her brother-in-law. Measles and whoop-
ing-cough were prevalent in Haworth, and
the children at the Parsonage did not escape
infection. Maria and Elizabeth had both
diseases at once, and coughed far into the
spring. The younger children rallied more
quickly. The convalescence of the older
sisters may have been retarded by their
sedentary habits and closer confinement to
the house. The bracing air of the upper
moors would be recommended as a specific
for whooping-cough by the modern country
practitioner.

While the four lesser children raced over

the heather and spent all their half-holidays

under the open sky, Maria and Elizabeth

sat and sewed with their aunt upon the

41

42 Charlotte Bronte at Home

outfit they were to take with them to
school the first of July.

The home-circle was to be broken at last ;
the moorland nest was stirred. Father,
aunt, Mr. Bronte's clerical brethren, and
their benevolent consorts, were agreed as
to the expediency of sending the girls to
boarding-school. They were bright learn-
ers, undoubtedly, and in one way and
another had acquired, if they had not as-
similated, an enormous amount of mis-
cellaneous information, most of which
would be utterly useless in future life.
They had no accomplishments, and pro-
ficiency in these was not attainable in
Haworth. Their father could teach them
Greek and Latin, but not French or Ger-
man, music and drawing. If they would
not be at a hopeless disadvantage when
compared with other girls and young wo-
men of their station, a change was imper-
atively needed.

The school indicated by Providence, and
an advisory committee of the aforemen-
tioned well-wishers, had been in successful
operation for a year at the village of Cowan
Bridge, not far from Leeds. It was founded
by a clergyman, and was what we would

School Life at Cowan Bridge 43

stigmatise as "a lialf-chiaritable organisa-
tion," designed expressly for the daugliters
of impecunious clergymen. Mr. Bronte
had five girls and a small income. For
fifteen pounds a year each of his daughters
could be taught grammar, writing, arith-
metic, ail kinds of needlework, with a
practical knowledge of clear starching
and laundrywork in general, history, geo-
graphy, with the use of the globes, and for
three pounds more, music or drawing. The
uniform of the school was adapted to the
slender means of the semi-patrons, semi-
beneficiaries, whose offspring were to reap
the advantages of the institution: white
frocks on Sunday, nankeen on week-days ;
purple stuff frocks, with cloth cloaks of
the same colour, in winter. The outfit
of frock, cloak, bonnet, tippet, and frills
was furnished by the trustees, each pupil
bringing three pounds for the purchase
thereof.

Moderate as the terms sound, it was
necessary for Mr. Bronte to pay one hun-
dred and eighty dollars yearly for his two
girls, thirty dollars more if they wished to
study music or drawing. The Haworth
living has never, I am told, been worth

44 Charlotte Bronte at Home

more than two hundred and fifty pounds
per annum, and while money went farther
then than now, a family of eight people,
and two, or even one servant, must have
practised strict economy to avoid running
into debt.

An old woman, a former parishioner of
Mr. Bronte, described some of these frugal
methods to me. She said that all the
household sewing was done by Miss Bran-
well and her nieces, even to making their
own dresses. The girls, after they were
grown, wore the same bonnets, without
alteration of shape or trimming, for two
years. The gowns and other clothing of
the children were invariably whole and
clean, but each article was mended as long
as it would hold together ; their linen under-
garments were darned by a thread until
the original fabric scarcely appeared at all.
They knit their own stockings and when
holes were worn in them, imitated the
stitch in darning after the Belgian fashion
of which Caroline Helstone complained in
Shirley.

How many heart-tremblings and qualms
of prospective homesickness and yearnings
over the dear ones to be left behind went

School Life at Cowan Bridge 4==,

with the stitching of chemises and gather-
ing of petticoats and hemming of hand-
kerchiefs, while the "little mother" and
her almost twin in age wrought under
their aunt's eye through the lengthening
afternoons formerly devoted to roaming
and dreaming aloud to one another, out of
hearing of unsympathetic listeners, — it
pains us to the heart to imagine. It is
easy, as a rule, to transplant young shoots.
These had struck their roots so deep that
removal was agony.

In my humble, individual opinion, the
best boarding-school is a poor substitute
for a tolerably good home. The "half-
charity " at Cowan Bridge was a new or-
ganisation, unseasoned, and stiff in the
hinges. After weighing the pros and cons
of the controversy that raged over the sub-
ject after the publication of Jane Eyre and
Mrs. Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Bronte, the
impartial judge must credit much that
Charlotte wrote of "Lowood" and her
biographers corroboration of the same.
There was all too much truth in the stories
of badly cooked food, unkind (probably
because cheap) under-teachers, and such
evils of drainage and dampness as led to

46 Charlotte Bronte at Home

the low fever that broke out in the school
in 1825.

1 have said that in Helen Burns Char-
lotte embodied tender and mournful recol-
lections of the "little mother" who had
guided her first tottering footsteps, and left
the image of a saintly martyr in her heart
and soul. Whether the fare at Cowan
Bridge school were good, as the defenders
of the institution assert, or bad, as Char-
lotte told Mrs. Gaskell it was, and made
the worse "by the dirty carelessness of
the cook, so that she and her sisters dis-
liked their meals exceedingly," — there is no
doubt that Maria's sojourn there was a
period of suffering, borne with angelic pa-
tience. She was " delicate, unusually clever
and thoughtful for her age, gentle, and — un-
tidy." Her mother had had no time to
train her in habits of orderly neatness,
with five other children racing upon the
heels of the first-born, and since the child
was able to run alone she had been too
busy looking after the younger babies to
think of herself. She had a cough when
she entered the school, and it never left her.
Charlotte tells us — and she never exagger-
ated the truth — that the sisters, used to the

School Life at Cowan Bridge 47

dainty simplicity of the Parsonage table,
were hungry all the time they were at
Cowan Bridge. The porridge was often
scorched; the rice- and custard-puddings
were made with rain-water from a cistern
that caught the wash from the roofs; so-
called meat-pies were composed of the
scrapings of plates and dishes, and the
milk tasted of the unwashed pans in which
it was kept. Maria studied far beyond
her strength and was frequently ill, espe-
cially as the winter approached, and the
racking cough everybody took as a natural
sequel of last winter's illness, wore upon
lungs and nerves.

An under-teacher, branded with infamy
by Charlotte as "Miss Scatcherd," slept in
a small chamber opening out of the fireless
dormitory, and one morning when Maria,
whose side had been blistered a day or so
before to avert pleurisy, was slowly putting
on her stockings in bed, " Miss Scatcherd
issued from her room, and without asking
for a word of explanation from the sick
and frightened girl, took her by the arm,
on the side to which the blister had been
applied, and whirled her out into the mid-
dle of the floor, abusing her all the time.

48 Charlotte Bronte at Home

for dirty and untidy Iiabits. " Mrs. Gasliell
had tile tale from an eye-witness, and it
agrees well with Charlotte's description of
what her sister endured.

Elizabeth, of whom we hear less than of
the others, fared better when she was laid
up for some days by a severe cut upon
the head. The superintendent — "Miss
Temple " oi Jane Eyre — kept her in her own
room and took care of her until she was
able to be about. From this lady we learn
that the second daughter bore her suffering
with the "exemplary patience" that was a
family trait, and won much upon her nurse's
esteem. The passing allusion to Elizabeth
and her restful seclusion in the teacher's
room is the one gleam of light in the Cowan
Bridge episode, and it is faint enough.

The two elder sisters seem to have made
no complaint at home of food or teachers,
or it was not considered worthy of atten-
tion if such were entered, for Charlotte and
Emily were enrolled as pupils in Septem-
ber. The latter is said by Miss Temple to
have been ' ' a darling child, under five years
of age, and quite the pet nursling of the
school." Charlotte is referred to as "a
bright, clever little child."

School Life at Cowan Bridge 49

So bright, as the event proved, that
nothing escaped her eyes, and nothing was
lost from the retentive memory. So clever
that her picture of these, the first months
she had spent out of her home, is as sharp
and vivid as an artist's proof etching from
a master's hand.

" We had to pass an hour every day in the open air.
Our clothing was insufficient to protect us from the
severe cold. We had no boots ; the snow got into our
shoes and melted there ; our ungloved hands became
numbed and covered with chilblains, as were our feet.
I remember well the distracting irritation I endured from
this cause every evening, when my feet inflamed, and
the torture of thrusting the swelled, raw, and stiff toes
into my shoes in the morning. Then, the scanty supply
of food was distressing. With the keen appetites of
growing children, we had scarcely sufficient to keep alive
a delicate invalid. Whenever the famished great girls
had an opportunity, they would coax or menace the
little ones out of their portion. Many a time I have
shared between two claimants the precious morsel of
brown bread distributed at tea-time, and, after relin-
quishing to a third half the contents of my mug of coffee,
1 have swallowed the remainder with an accompaniment
of secret tears, forced from me by the exigency of
hunger.

" Sundays were dreary days in that wintry season.
We had to walk two miles to church. We set out
cold ; we arrived at church colder. During the morning
service we became almost paralysed. It was too far to
return to dinner, and an allowance of cold meat and

50 Charlotte Bronte at Home

bread, in the same penurious proportion observed in our
daily meals, was served round between tlie services.

" At the close of the afternoon service we returned by
an exposed and hilly road, where the bitter winter wind,
blowing over a range of snowy summits to the north,
almost flayed the skin from our faces.

" How we longed for the light and heat of a blazing
fire when we got back ! But to the little ones, at
least, this was denied. Each hearth in the schoolroom
was immediately surrounded by a double row of great
girls, and behind them the younger children crouched
in groups, wrapping their starved arms in their pinafores.

"A little solace came at tea-time in the shape of a
double ration of bread — a whole, instead of a half-slice —
with the delicious addition of a thin scrape of butter.
It was the hebdomadal treat to which we all looked
forward from Sabbath to Sabbath. I generally contrived
to reserve a moiety of this bounteous repast for myself,
but the remainder I was invariably obliged to part with."

Should it seem incredible that Mr Bronte
and Miss Branwell, but half-a-day's journey
distant from Cowan Bridge, suspected no-
thing of privations which endangered the
girls' lives, we must hark back to other ac-
counts of the singular unconcern manifested
at that day by parents in every rank of
society with respect to the school experi-
ences of their children. They were passed
over, body and soul, to instructors paid to
conduct their education. Punishments were

School Life at Cowan Bridare s i

fc5^

severe, and, to our notion, barbarous in
variety and ingenuity. Tlie ferule, the rod,
dunce-cap and stool, the dark room, fasting
upon bread and water for a week at a time,
— were some of the commonest and mild-
est penances inflicted for imperfect lessons,
untidiness, and trivial lapses in speech and
deportment. Home letters were supervised
before they were posted, and any symptom
of discontent was summarily punished.
All of this belonged to the educational sys-
tem which found favour in our forefathers'
eyes, and is affectionately alluded to by
purblind sentimentalists of our generation
as "the good old times."

Furthermore, let us consider the im-
probability that the four Haworth exiles
formulated any complaint against school
and teachers. Charlotte explains their sub-
mission to the grievous present in one
sentence uttered by Helen Burns.

"You must wish to leave Lowood.?"
queries Jane Eyre.

"No. Why should I? 1 was sent to
Lowood to get an education, and it would
be of no use going away until I have attained
that object."

The love of learning for learning's sake

52 Charlotte Bronte at Home

was already a passion with the home-bred
pupils, so much older in mind than in body.
In words that to our imaginations burn
and throb along the printed page, Charlotte
depicts the unfolding of her intellect and
fancy under the tuition she received that
otherwise dour and fateful winter. As we
read, we are reminded of the efflorescence
of some gorgeous tropical plant, in its na-
tive soil, and in the fulness of its own
season. Biting cold, pinching hunger, and
small tyrannies are forgotten or minimised.

" I toiled hard, and my success was proportionate to
my efforts. My memory, not naturally tenacious, im-
proved with practice ; exercise sharpened my wits. In
a few weeks I was promoted to a higher class ; in less
than two months I was allowed to commence French
and drawing. 1 learned the first two tenses of the verb
^tre and sketched my first cottage on the same day.
That night, on going to bed, 1 forgot to prepare in
imagination the Barmecide supper of hot roast potatoes,
or white bread and new milk, with which I was wont
to amuse my inward cravings. 1 feasted, instead, on the
spectacle of ideal drawings which I saw in the dark ; all
the work of my own hands ; freely pencilled houses and
trees, picturesque rocks and ruins, Cuyp-like groups of
cattle, sweet paintings of butterflies hovering over un-
blown roses, of birds picking at ripe cherries, of wrens'
nests enclosing pearl-like eggs, wreathed about with
young ivy sprays. 1 examined, too, in thought, the

School Life at Cowan Bridge 53

possibility of my ever being able to translate currently
a certain little French story-book which Madame Pierrot
had, that day, shown me ; — nor was that problem
solved to my satisfaction ere I fell sweetly asleep."

CHAPTER V

DEATHS OF MARIA AND ELIZABETH — MARIa'S
SUCCESSOR — FIRESIDE CONCLAVES

" 1 have not the least hesitation in saying that, upon
the whole, the comforts were as many and the privations
as few at Cowan Bridge as can well be found in so large
an establishment. How far young, or delicate, children
are able to contend with the necessary evils of ^ public
school is, in my opinion, ^ very grave question, and
does not enter into the present discussion."

The extract from the letter of a former
teacher in the Cowan Bridge School, while
offered in vindication of the founder and
managers of the institution in question,
leaves the case of the Bronte sisters to the
judgment of those who have heard Char-
lotte's version of it, and Mrs. Gaskell's
sifting of the evidence laid before her at a
much later date.

The four daughters of the Haworth clergy-
man were altogether too young and too

54

Deaths of Maria and Elizabeth 5 s

delicate to be subjected to the obvious
chances and rude changes of a boarding-
school conducted upon strictly economical
principles, even had their previous training
been that of the ordinary little girl of the
period, born and bred in a rural parsonage.

A low fever, approximating typhus, ap-
peared among the pupils in the spring of
1825. Charlotte's account of the dread
visitant is doubtless as accurate as it is
thrilling. The opening sentence frames the
picture :

"That forest-dell, where Lowood lay,
was the cradle of fog and fog-bred pesti-
lence, which, quickening with the quicken-
ing spring, crept into the Orphan Asylum,
breathed typhus through its crowded
schoolroom and dormitory, and, ere May
arrived, transformed the seminary into a
hospital."

In the stricter surveillance of the girls'
health consequent upon the alarm, Maria
Bronte's condition came under the notice
of attendant physicians. She had escaped
the fever, but was pronounced to be far
gone in consumption. Her father, sum-
moned imperatively, was amazed and hor-
rified at finding her changed almost beyond

56 Charlotte Bronte at Home

recognition since he had last seen her, and
hurried her home without a day's delay.
She was lifted into the Leeds coach, propped
against pillows, and her sisters kissed for
the last time the white face pitifully wasted
and small, lighted by great eyes whose
" singular beauty was of meaning, of move-
ment, of radiance." The eyes rested that
night upon the home for which she had
longed in unuttered and unutterable heart-
sickness through the year of exile. The
breath of the moors, the pure sweep of the
wind over the dear and remembered hills,
could not fill the shattered lungs. For less
than a week she lay, smiling and patient, in
the chamber where her mother had lan-
guished for so long, awaiting the summons
for which the name-daughter now listened ;
looking through the same window upon
the square tower silhouetted against the
sky. Maria passed quietly away on the
sixth of May, and was buried beside her
mother under the church floor.

Less than a fortnight afterward, the coach
stopped at Cowan Bridge Seminary for an-
other sick child. The authorities, awakened
from apathy by the tidings of Maria Bronte's
death so soon after leaving the school as

Deaths of Maria and Elizabeth 5 7

to disparage the sanitary conditions of tlie
place, or the care she had had there, were
uneasy at Elizabeth's racking cough and
the clear pallor of her complexion. Medical
examination showed that she, also, was in
the last stages of phthisis. She was made
ready hurriedly and sent off to Haworth
under the care of a trustworthy attendant.
News of her death on June 15th reached
Charlotte and Emily just before the mid-
summer holidays to which they were
looking forward with feverish eagerness.

It passes our understanding, knowing
what we do, at this distance from the time
and scene of the piteous little tragedy, that
Mr. Bronte should have returned the two
girls to Cowan Bridge in September. Par-
tial elucidation is furnished by the teacher's
letter from which an extract was made
awhile ago.

"During both these visits" (/. e., when
he brought Maria and Elizabeth in July, and
again Charlotte and Emily in September,
1824) " Mr. Bronte lodged at the school, sat
at the same table with the children, saw the
whole routine of the establishment, and, so
far as 1 have ever known, was satisfied with
everything that came under his observation. "

^8 Charlotte Bronte at Home

" The two younger children enjoyed uni-
formly good health/' is an italicised sen-
tence that weakens the force of that which
preceded it when we learn that both
these younger children were taken from the
school before the winter closed in. "It
was evident that the damp situation of the
house at Cowan Bridge did not suit their
health." We hope it was the father who
took alarm at the unchildlike gravity that,
like a frost in springtime, had struck the
brightness out of Charlotte's face, and at
the spiritless diligence with which she per-
formed tasks in which she formerly revelled.

She cherished the memory of her dead
sisters as long as she lived as " wonders of
talent and kindness." She gave Maria im-
mortality as "Helen Burns." Called sud-
denly and terribly to take the eldest sister's
place to the three whom Maria had borne
in her arms and her heart from the hour of
their birth until the day when Branwell and
Anne were lifted to her bed for a farewell
kiss from her stiffening lips — Charlotte left
childhood behind her forever. Mrs. Gas-
kell says "the duties that now fell upon
her seemed almost like a legacy from the
gentle little sufferer."

Maria's Successor 59

What Maria had suffered in the ungenial
atmosphere of the semi-charity school was
burned into Charlotte's mind, as witness
Jane Eyre. Maria's motherly solicitude,
her graces of mind and heart, the singular
absence of low and selfish motives in all
that she said and did, made up an exemplar
which her successor in the home strove, in
the like unselfish spirit, to follow.

The home-coming in the late autumn,
when the hillsides were "livid," when the
plover had gone southward, and the hardier
swifts flew low in the gusty afternoons,
was comfort rather than happiness. In
the long walks, at once resumed and never
discontinued by her as girl and woman, it
was Charlotte who looked after the feebler
children, repressed Branwell's sauciness,
and mediated between him and Emily, — his
"chum" among his sisters, yet the one
with whom he oftenest quarrelled. The
lessons in the father's study were taken up
as if they had never been laid aside, — Bran-
well and Anne bringing the class back to
the original size. Miss Branwell drilled her
nieces in thrift and needlework. A middle-
aged Haworth woman, wiry in body as in
character, was installed as maid-of-all-work.

6o Charlotte Bronte at Home

and as "our Tabby," in time, got all of the
household, the master not excepted, under
her kindly yet despotic rule.

Now and then, a clergyman from the
neighbourhood, or from a distant parish,
took dinner or tea with Mr. Bronte, or
some school-meeting or clerical conference
in the Haworth Church brought a batch of
five or six to dine, sup, and sleep at the
Parsonage. At such times " the children "
sat at table, and about the fire in the even-
ings, hearkening with open ears and non-
committal faces to the professional talk,
— each, all unsuspected by the subjects of
the mental criticism, taking notes for future
use. Other glimpses of what lay beyond
the girdling hills they loved, they had none,
save through books and newspapers.

"We take two, and see three, newspapers a week,"
wrote Charlotte in her diary, complacently. " We take
the Leeds Intelligencer, a most excellent Tory news-
paper, and the Leeds Mercury, Whig, edited by IWr.
Baines, and his brother, son-in-law, and his two sons,
Edward and Talbot. We see the John Bull ; it is a
high Tory, very violent. IVlr. Driver lends us it, as like-
wise Blackwoods' Maga:(ine, the most able periodical
there is. The editor is IVlr. Christopher North, an old
man, seventy-four years of age ; the ist of April is his
birth-day. His company are Timothy Tickler, Morgan

Fireside Conclaves 6i

O'Doherty, Macr:ibin Mordecai, MuUion, Warnell, and
James Hogg, a man of most extraordinary genius, a
Scottish sliepherd."

The bookish talk is only redeemed from
priggishness by the grave simplicity of the
JLivenile critic. Books and periodicals were
more alive to her than the inhabitants of
the next parish. The story goes in the
village that all four of the Parsonage child-
ren were once invited to a child's birthday
party at the house of one of the small gen-
try in the neighbourhood. Then and there
they underwent agonies of discomfort, first
from bashfulness, and then from finding
themselves the focus of twenty pairs of
eyes, some pitying, some contemptuous,
all amazed at the discovery that the three
girls and one boy knew not one children's
game — not even " Hunt the Slipper," or
" Round about the Gooseberry Bush."

We can imagine the indignant warmth
of the discussion upon the events of the
afternoon that went on over the kitchen
fire that night, with perhaps Tabby as a
sympathetic listener. She counted for
nothing in the conclaves never held in the
hearing of fother or aunt. We may be
sure that "Slipper" and "Gooseberry

62 Charlotte Bronte at Home

Bush " fared ill by comparison with their
home diversions.

"Our plays were established; — Young Men, June,
1826 " (just a year after Elizabeth's death), wrote the
bookish diarist ; " Our Fellows, July, 1827 ; Islanders,
December, 1827. These are our three great plays that
are not kept secret. Emily's and my best plays were
established the first of December, 1827 ; the others',
March, 1828. Best plays mean secret plays ; they are
very nice ones. All our plays are very strange ones."

Like the brains that invented, and the
wits that carried them on. We are still in
the dark as to the modus operandi of each
after reading further :

" 1 will try to sketch out the origin of our plays more
explicitly if I can. First : Young Men. — Papa bought
Branwell some wooden soldiers at Leeds. When Papa
came home it was night, and we were in bed, so next
morning Branwell came to our door with a box of sol-
diers. Emily and 1 jumped out of bed, and 1 snatched
up one, and exclaimed — ' This is the Duke of Welling-
ton ! This shall be the Duke ! ' When 1 had said this,
Emily likewise took up one and said it sliould be hers ;
when Anne came down, she said one should be hers.
Mine was the prettiest of the whole, and the tallest, and
the most perfect in every part. Emily's was a grave-
looking fellow, and we called him 'Gravey,' Anne's
was a queer little thing, much like herself, and we
called him ' Waiting Boy.' Branwell chose his, and
called him ' Buonaparte.'"

"The Children's study" h^

The date of this entry in Charlotte's jour-
nal is 1829, when she was thirteen years old.

As naturally as the oak is evolved from
the acorn, living in books as with human
companions led to the writing of books.
The children had always been silent and
repressed indoors. When pent up in the
hall-room upstairs by days of continuous
storm, they were as quiet now as when
Maria hushed their prattle to whispers and
enjoined them to laugh low because "poor
mamma " was ill in the adjoining room.
The aunt, "clicking about the stone stairs
and halls in pattens," must have smiled con-
tentedly in passing the closed door of what
was never "the nursery" after Anne's
cradle was taken away. After all, the
children did credit to her training. If she
glanced in at them occasionally, from the
force of habit and conscience, she saw
nothing unusual in their occupations. Paper,
pencil, book, and pen were to them what
doll-houses, kites, tops, and whips were to
other girls and boys. Charlotte covered
hundreds of pages of copy-books and the
blank ends of old letters with minute char-
acters one requires the aid of a magnifying-
glass to decipher. Her favourite study was

64 Charlotte Bronte at Home

the broad, high window-seat. Curled up
like a kitten, she would write for hours
without speaking, holding her paper close
to her near-sighted eyes, a trick she was
not cured of at Cowan Bridge. Emily
sat on the floor, using her knees for a desk.
Branwell would sprawl at full length, his
chin supported by his hand, the book from
which he read, or the paper on which he
wrote, on the floor before him. Even little
Anne scribbled stories with a pencil in
"coarse hand" — as writing-teachers called
it a generation back — by the time she was
five years old.

The scene is eerie as we sketch it to our-
selves, — ^the uncanny group of small im-
mortals, whose childhood was surely unlike
any other ever lived in Christian and modern
times; the intent faces and dreamful eyes
bent over busy fingers ; the brooding silence,
unbroken save by the moan of the wind
and the plashing rain against the panes.
What Charlotte saw when she raised her
head to gaze through the window, she
painted a score of years later, in a few
masterly strokes :

"There is only one cloud in the sky ; but it curtains
it from pole to pole. The wind cannot rest ; it hurries

" The Children's study " 65

sobbing over hills of sullen outline, colourless with
twilight and mist. Rain has beat all day on that
church-tower. It rises dark from the stony enclosure of
its church-yard ; the nettles, the long grass, and the
tombs, all drip with wet."

The little parallelogram of dooryard be-
tween the Parsonage and the then treeless
burial-ground, paved with weather-black-
ened tombstones, is now filled with shrub-
bery and flowers. When Charlotte surveyed
it in the musing intervals of composition,
a clump of stunted currant-bushes, some
dwarf evergreens, and, on the wall, a patch
of ivy, were all that relieved the monotone
of grey and black. Right before her was
the door in the wall which had been un-
locked but three times since they came to
Haworth to live, and would not be opened
again until another coffin was ready to be
borne through, down the sloping path to
the church porch. Such was the custom
of the region. The mute memento mori
faced the door by which the living went in
and out of their temporary dwelling in
business pertaining to the life that now is.

CHAPTER VI

MISS WOOLER'S school — MARY TAYLOR

AND ELLEN NUSSEY

AMONG the incidents transmitted to us
tending to prove that Mr. Bronte was
not so indifferent to his children's happiness
or so unobservant of their occupations as
we have inclined to believe, we note two
belonging to the five years spent by Char-
lotte under his tutelage after her return from
Cowan Bridge in the autumn of 1825.

One has been given in her account of
the origin of the "strange plays" invented
by the four. If the father had a favourite
in the flock it was his only son, — the hand-
somest, and reckoned by family and neigh-
bours to be the most brilliant of them all.
The girls had no dolls, but a box of toy-
soldiers was brought from Leeds for the
petted boy. Still the father offered no ob-

66

X

I-
cc
o

<

Early MSS. 67

jection to the division of the puppets for
the furtherance of the "play" of Young
Men.

Mr. Shorter tells of a sixpenny blank-
book given to Charlotte by her father, on
the cover of which is written :

"" All that is written in this book must be
in a good, plain, and legible hand. — T. B. ' '

He was cognisant, then, of the scribbling
propensities of his daughter, had probably
had a glimpse of the MSS. done in micro-
scopic characters, and gave a broad hint as
to his wishes on that head.

The earliest date affixed to any of the
Bronte manuscripts is upon — as we ob-
serve with surprise — an "exceedingly child-
ish production," or so says Mr. Shorter,
"By P. B. Bronte." The title is The
Battle of Washington, and there are " full-
page coloured illustrations." It was written
in 1827, Bran well being then ten years old.
From babyhood he fancied himself, and
was believed by his kindred, to be an artist
born.

Charlotte made no such claim for herself,
but her passionate love of the beautiful, the
artistic tastes she had no opportunity to in-
dulge, and, above all, the strong necessity

68 Charlotte Bronte at Home

of expression that consumed her like a rest-
less fire, impelled her to use pencil with
pen. Every engraving or sketch that came
in her way was examined critically by the
short-sighted eyes until she had seen all
that was in it, and much that would escape
an ordinary spectator. At this time she
had a hope, secret and strenuous, of be-
coming an artist, and practised drawing
with painstaking assiduity. Knowing no-
thing of rules and methods except from the
few lessons she had had at Cowan Bridge,
she set herself to copying engravings, line
for line, work for which the long, delicate
lingers of her tiny hands were especially
adapted.

"Stippling, 1 believe they call it," she
wrote afterward of the misdirected labour.
"I thought it very fine at the time."

" Oh, 1 feel like a seed in the cold earth,
Quickening at heart, and pining for the air ! "

The lines recur to us continually in follow-
ing the course of her life, so tame upon the
surface, so tumultuous within.

A quarter-mile or more down the street
closed by churchyard and Parsonage, lived
a joiner and cabinet-maker — a character in

The Brontes as Artists 69

his way, and with a warm side to his
heart for the "Parson's children." His
shop, on the second floor of his house, saw
them more frequently than the interior of
any other dwelling in the village. Hardly
a week passed in which one or the other,
sometimes all four, of the shy, grave-eyed
students did not appear in the upper room
— redolent of newly cut woods, paint, and
varnish. They were always bound upon
one errand. A picture in pencil or water-
colours needed a frame, and a bargain was
to be struck with Mr. Wood for it. With
true Yorkshire and Bronte-esque independ-
ence, not one of the artists would accept
the frame as a gift. A piece of his or her
own work was to be bartered for what was
needed. As the frames were to be made
of odd corners left over from larger pictures,
scraps of cornices, door and window cas-
ings, at second hand, or which had been
cast aside as unavailable for other purposes
by the workman, he would gladly have
donated the materials and glued them into
the requisite form for the pleasure of serv-
ing the "odd, clever creatures." He knew
them too well, and had too much native
tact, to insist upon this point. So with

70 Charlotte Bronte at Home

genuine breeding and kindness, he accepted
the poor little daub or scrawl, hunted up
suitable stuff for the frame that was to en-
close the picture reserved by the owner,
and accounted it a business transaction.

" He had a drawerful of the pictures he got in this
way," his daughter told me. " When the young gen-
tleman got older and could really paint, he did several
large pictures for my father in exchange for bigger frames.
One of these frames — quite large and heavy — was in-
tended for a picture painted for Mr. Bronte. The sub-
ject was Jacob's Ladder. Mr. Bronte thought so
much of it that he hung it over his study mantel. One
night, a candle was left accidentally too near it, and a
corner of the frame took fire. You can see the painting
in the Bronte Museum."

From this family I heard a warm vindica-
tion of Mr. Bronte from the charge of ex-
cessive harshness to his motherless children,
and neglect of their wants and feehngs.
Here, too, I had the same testimony I had
gathered from other parishioners, to his
popularity with the poorer classes, and his
indulgence in monetary matters. What-
ever the people wanted they got if he could
grant it. When the tithes were not paid,
he would not press pew-renters for them.
Sometimes he lost as much as ;£ioo per

The Brontes as Artists 7 1

annum by his "easy ways." That was
one reason he was always poor.

The aged widow of Mr. Wood repeated
the story others had given me of Bran-
well's many and dazzling gifts of mind and
person. She had seen him, again and
again, write two letters at once, one with
each hand, talking brightly all the time
upon a third subject — ■" Poor lad ! He
might have been anything he pleased, if
he had only kept steady ! I have wished,
often and often, that we had kept the
children's bits of drawings. They would
be interesting now."

1 cared not a jot for Jacob's Ladder, hav-
ing seen enough of Branwell's pictures — all
more or less wretched — to slake any curi-
osity 1 may have felt on that head. 1 should
have liked to have a peep at Charlotte's
"stipplings" and the free-hand sketches
by means of which she strove to make
thought visible.

She catalogues twenty-two books writ-
ten by herself in those five years of house-
work, desultory study, and browsing in her
father's library of English classics ; of por-
ing over political leaders, news of the na-
tions, and literary reviews in the few

72 Charlotte Bronte at Home

newspapers which they saw, and " Black-
wood's Magai/ne, the most able periodical
there is." Some of her writings are in two
volumes, some in three, some in four.
There are tales, autobiographies, travels,
political disquisitions, ballads and short
poems, a drama, an epic, conversations, —
all engrossed in the clear, small script that
tantalises the average eyesight ; thousands
upon thousands of words, written because
she must write, and with no ulterior thought
of publication.

The Young Men's Magazine, in six num-
bers, was printed with a pen by Charlotte
for circulation in the "study," her two
sisters and her brother constituting the
whole number of subscribers and readers.
Not one word of the tens of thousands was
read to father or aunt. So long as the
children were quiet and not in mischief,
Miss Branwell did not trouble herself with
their doings out of work-hours, and Mr.
Bronte was more self-absorbed with each
passing year of widowerhood.

When Charlotte was fifteen he awoke to
the conviction that she was no longer one
of the children, and bestirred himself to
find a school where she could be fitted to

Miss Wooler's School 73

do a woman's part in the working-day
world. His choice fell, happily for all
concerned, upon Miss Margaret Wooler's
boarding-home for girls at Roe Head, a
commodious country-house standing in its
own grounds a little back from the Leeds
coach-road, about twenty miles from
Haworth.

The physical features of the two neigh-
bourhoods are as unlike as if they were
twenty leagues apart. The visitor to the
sun-warmed slopes and pleasant pastures
of the contiguous manor of Kirklees, in
the heart of whose "immemorial wood"
Robin Hood is said to be buried, turns, for
the most graphic picture of the scene, to
Charlotte's sketch of it in Shirley :

" They looked down on the deep valley robed in May
raiment ; on varied meads, some pearled with daisies,
and some golden with king-cups. To-day all this young
verdure smiled clear in sunlight ; transparent emerald
and amber gleams played over it. On Nunnwood"
(Kirklees) " — the sole remnant of antique British forest in
a region whose lowlands were once all sylvan chase, as
its highlands were breast-deep heather — slept the shadow
of a cloud ; the distant hills were dappled ; the horizon
was shaded and tinted like mother-of-pearl ; silvery
blues, soft purples, evanescent greens and rose-shades,
all melting into fleeces of white cloud, pure as azure

74 Charlotte Bronte at Home

snow — allured the eye as with a remote glimpse of
heaven's foundations. The air blowing on the green brow
of the Common was fresh, and sweet, and bracing."

Beauty of this type was as new to the
Haworth recluse as the friendships she was
to form at Roe Head with Miss Wooler and
the two girls who came to know her better
than any other human beings ever did, ex-
cept her sisters. Mary Taylor and Ellen
Nussey were already domesticated in Miss
Wooler's household when Charlotte was
entered as a pupil. The Taylor sisters,
Mary and Martha, were the daughters of a
Yorkshire banker whose country-seat was
but three miles from Roe Head. Charlotte
has drawn the family with strength and
spirit in Shirley as the "Yorkes." The
fidelity of the portraiture is vouched for by
one of Mary's brothers, the "Martin" of
the novel, to whom the chapter depicting
the household was submitted in MS. His
only adverse criticism was that she "had
not drawn them strongly enough."

Mary, the elder of the girls, was " Rose
Yorke" ; Martha was "Jessie." Miss
Wooler thought Mary "too pretty to live "
when she was brought to her school.
Charlotte describes Mary's face as

Mary Taylor and Ellen Nussey 7s

" not harsh, nor yet quite pretty. It is simple— childlike
in feature; the round cheel<s bloom ; as to the grey eyes,
they are otherwise than childlike — a serious soul lights
them. She has a mind full-set, thick-sown

with the germs of ideas her mother never knew. It is
agony to her often to have these ideas trampled on and
repressed. She has never rebelled yet ; but, if hard-
driven, she will rebel one day, and then it will be once
for all."

As a pendant to this crayon-sketch, we
have Mary's picture of Charlotte, as she
saw her on a raw mid-January morning in
the year 1831 :

' ' 1 first saw her coming out of a covered cart, in very
old-fashioned clothes, and looking very cold and miser-
able. She was coming to school at iWiss Wooler's.
When she appeared in the school-room, her dress was
changed, but just as old. She looked a little old woman,
so short-sighted that she always appeared to be seeking
something, and moving her head from side to side to
catch a sight of it. She was very shy and nervous, and
spoke with a strong Irish accent. When a book was
given her, she dropped her head over it till her nose
nearly touched it, and when she was told to hold her
head up, up went the book after it, still close to her nose,
so that it was not possible to help laughing." *

On the same day Charlotte Bronte and
Ellen Nussey (the "Caroline Helstone " of

*Mrs. Gaskell's Life of Charlotte Bronte.

76 Charlotte Bronte at Home

Shirley) met for the first time. This young
girl, then near Charlotte's own age — fifteen,
lived with her brothers at Brookroyd, a fine
old homestead four miles from Roe Head.
Biographers are agreed that Charlotte drew
no more correct portrait — and she never
failed of "catching a likeness" — than in
"Caroline Helstone," albeit the lonely, de-
pendent niece of the austere rector of Briar-
field differed widely in environment from the
petted member of a large family, and with
whom life had gone upon velvet from her
babyhood. I give the portrait as Charlotte
has painted it, love prompting each touch.
As we read we can see a tender smile
lighting up the great red-hazel eyes, of
which Mrs. Gaskell says, "I never saw
the like in any other human creature."

" It was not absolutely necessary to know her in order
to like her. She was fair enough to please, even at the
first view. Her shape suited her age ; it was girlish,
light, and pliant ; every curve was neat, every limb pro-
portionate ; her face was expressive and gentle ; her
eyes were handsome, and gifted, at times, with a win-
ning beam that stole into the heart, with a language that
spoke softly to the affections. Her mouth was very
pretty ; she had a delicate skin, and a fine flow of
brown hair which she knew how to arrange with taste ;
curls became her, and she possessed them in picturesque

Mary Taylor and Ellen Nussey 77

profusion. Her style of dress announced taste in tlie
wearer ; very unobtrusive in fasliion, far from costly in
material, but suitable in colour to the fair complexion
with which it contrasted, and in make to the slight form
which it draped."

Coming softly, as it was her wont to
move, into the schoolroom at the noon re-
cess, Ellen espied a small figure shrinking
into the recess of a window overlooking
the playground. The ten or dozen girls
who then composed the family-school were
pelting one another with snowballs in the
courtyard, their shrieks of laughter ringing
clearly through the frozen air. The new
pupil was crying quietly, wiping the tears
furtively as they dropped, although she
thought herself unseen. Her dress was
uncouth, herself miserably bashful, as lost
and forlorn as if the carrier's covered cart
that had left her "to be called for," at Roe
Head, had dumped her upon another planet.

Did the memory of the interview that
followed steal over the mind of the suc-
cessful author when she wrote : — "Caro-
line had tact, and she had fine instinct.
She felt that Rose Yorke was a peculiar
child — one of the unique. She knew how
to treat her."

78 Charlotte Bronte at Home

So well did Ellen Nussey know how to
treat the desolate waif blown thither from
the moorland Parsonage, that she found
her way right speedily to the sealed fount-
ain of the stranger's heart, and kept her
place there until it was chilled by death.

As was to be expected, the Haworth
girl's ignorance of text-books and conven-
tional "education" was a woful stum-
bling-block for a time to her advancement.
Had Miss Wooler been the ordinary type
of teacher, the drawback might have been
almost fatal to the ambition to excel in her
studies that inspired Charlotte to conquer
homesickness and aversion to new associ-
ations. She spoke with prim correctness,
she wrote clear, nervous English, but she
knew not one rule of English grammar.
She had devoured all the books of travel
she could get hold of, and several of her
own composition were in the Catalogue
of My Books, -with the Date of their Com-
pletion, yet every child in the second class
at Miss Wooler's had "gone further" in
geography than she. That she was not
classed with the "little girls" was due to
her overwhelming distress when Miss
Wooler delicately hinted her fear that it

Mary Taylor and Ellen Nussey 79

would have to be done, and to that sensi-
ble and tender-hearted woman's decision
to give the odd duckling a fair chance to
show what was in her. She was ranged,
then, with Mary Taylor and Ellen Nussey,
and the trio soon found and kept their
places in the advance-guard of the home-
school. Charlotte became the story-teller
of the little band, as she had been to her
larger audience at Cowan Bridge, beguiling
wet out-of-school hours of tedium by tell-
ing tales from the Young Men's Magazine
and "out of her own head," and keeping
her roommates awake into the forbidden
hours by blood-curdling romances and
ghost-stories. While the rest frolicked in
the courtyard she sat under a tree, dividing
her attention between a book, and the
clouds in the sky, the lights and shadows
of the landscape. When urged to take a
hand in a ball-game, she acquiesced with
amiable indifference, but soon dropped out
because she could not see the ball when
tossed high. In muscle she was flaccid, in
motion languid unless excited to self-for-
getfulness. She ate little of anything, and
no meat at all.
Once, Mary Taylor, redundant in vitality,

8o Charlotte Bronte at Home

and impatient of physical feebleness, told
her new friend, with the frank brutality of
the British schoolgirl, that she was homely
and awkward. Long afterward she re-
minded Charlotte of the rudeness and
begged her forgiveness.

"You did me good, Polly, so don't re-
pent of it ! " was the reply, fraught with
meaning which Mary could appreciate,
knowing her as she did.

Then, as always, Charlotte was abso-
lutely free from personal vanity. Everyone
who has heard of her name and fame knows
of the argument with her sisters upon the
"moral wrong" of making every heroine
beautiful, and her boast, " 1 will show you
a heroine as plain and as small as myself,
who shall be as interesting as any of yours."

The jesting promise was the germ of
Jane Eyre.

Mary Taylor was as outspoken in her sur-
prise at the "things that were out of our
range altogether " which Charlotte knew.
She had read more books than they had
ever heard of, and forgot nothing she had
read ; was conversant with the works, and
had some knowledge of the personnel, of
every English author of note, speaking of

" Cleverality " 8i

them as naturally as her comrades chatted
of their neighbours and kinspeople.

"You are always talking about clever
people — Johnson and Sheridan and the
like ! " said one listener testily.

Charlotte lost the captious spirit of the
remark in the obvious incongruity of the
classification.

"You don't know the meaning of
'clever,' " she answered, in serious good
faith; and, meditatively, "Sheridan might
be clever. Yes ! Sheridan -ivas clever, —
scamps often are, — but Johnson had n't a
spark of cleverality in him."

One cannot but wish the great Lexico-
grapher had lived to hear the coined word,
distinctive of a shade of meaning not
reached by "cleverness." The occasional
bons mots recalled by her intimates prove
that she would have been as brilliant in
talk as with pen, but for the stifled life she
had led with respect to everybody and
everything without the walls of the home
where alone she was ever entirely and
happily her real self.

CHAPTER VII

HOME AGAIN — BROTHER AND SISTERS

CHARLOTTE remained atMiss Wooler's
school eighteen months, returning to
Haworth in 1832. Limited as was the cir-
cle of pupils and teachers that represented
society to her during her absence from
home, it was busy, lively, and stimulating
by comparison with the routine to which
Emily and Anne had been bound mean-
while. Miss Branwell's "set ways" hard-
ened into rigidity in her seclusion from the
mild dissipations of Penzance tea-parties
and family gatherings. In evidence of this,
we are told that she never changed the
style of her dress from what was "the
thing" in Penzance when she left that
place in 1823, and had her nieces' clothes
made upon the same models. Even in
Haworth they were "old-fashioned" in
82

Home Again 83

their Sunday best. Mr. Bronte had added
to this effect by bringing his daughters up
to despise fashion and finery. So long as
their garments were whole and neat, none
of them cared how they looked in other
people's eyes.

1 have heard much of this period of her
life from an old Haworth resident who
taught in the Sunday-school "turn and
turn about " with Charlotte. That is, they
had the same class on alternate Sundays,
and of course had frequent occasion to
consult upon matters connected with the
scholars, all drawn from the working
classes.

"Neat as neat could be," is the survivor's report.
" Never a break in a shoe, or a rip in a glove. But it
did not matter if her bonnet was four years old, and her
gowns were always made the one way. She was very
small — hardly bigger than a child of twelve, with such
bits of hands and feet ! Pretty ? No ! I should say not
— but pleasant of face. Her hair was light-brown — not
red, as 1 am told some people have said it was. A very
pretty colour, and never out of order. It did not curl,
and she wore it parted in the middle and brought down
each side of her face before it was put behind her ears —
as the fashion was then. Her nose looked larger be-
cause her face was thin ; her mouth was large, too, as
you see it in her picture. Her only good feature was
her eyes. They were a sort of reddish-brown, — a queer

84 Charlotte Bronte at Home

colour, but beautiful. When she talked they lighted up
until I 've seen her look almost handsome. Her voice
was pleasant, and the children liked her. She heard
them say the Catechism, and psalms, and collects, and
the like, but she never preached or talked much in the
class.

" She was not seen often in the village. Miss Bran-
well or Tabby did the marketing, and there was nothing
to call the Miss Brontes this way. When they walked,
it was up over the moors. They would go miles and
miles in that direction — always together, while there
were three of them ; afterward the two, and then but
the one. The walk out of the side-gate of the Parson-
age and through the field at the back and so on over the
hills to the waterfall, as much as three miles away, still
goes by the name of ' Charlotte Bronte's favourite walk.'
They were not so much what I should call ' unsociable '
as reserved. You see, they were brought up by them-
selves, and it was n't easy to change when they were
women grown. They would speak kindly and politely
to anybody they happened to meet, and ask after sick
people, and all that. They were never stiff, or what
would be considered stuck-up. She was just as simple
in her ways and as friendly as ever, after she became
celebrated."

We are indebted, however, to Ellen Nus-
sey, and to the correspondence between her
and Charlotte, for distinct and circumstan-
tial accounts of life in the Parsonage in the
three years succeeding Charlotte's gradua-
tion from Roe Head. In parting, the friends

Home Again 85

had engaged to exchange letters regularly
every month. Mrs. Gaskell was painfully
impressed, she says, with Charlotte's lack
of hopefulness. When pleasure came she
invariably met it with surprise, often min-
gled with incredulity. "Too good to be
true," was the language of thought, if not
always of tongue. Sorrow, pain, disap-
pointment, were familiar guests, received
without complaint, and given the liberty
of heart and home. We descry a touch of
this in the opening sentences of the first of
the many letters, treasured for forty years
by true-hearted, steadfast Ellen.

" Haworth, July 21, 1832.
" My dearest Ellen :

" Your kind and interesting letter gave me the sincer-
est pleasure. I have been expecting to hear from you
almost every day since my arrival at home, and I, at
length, began to despair of receiving the vv'ished-for
letter.

" You ask me to give you a description of the manner
in which I have passed every day since 1 left school.
This is soon done, as an account of one day is an account
of all. In the mornings, from nine o'clock to half-past
twelve, I instruct my sisters and draw ; then we walk
'till dinner. After dinner 1 sew 'till tea-time, and after
tea I either read, write, do a little fancy-work, or draw, as
1 please. Thus, in one delightful, 'though somewhat

86 Charlotte Bronte at Home

monotonous course, my life is passed. I have only been
out to tea twice since I came home. We are expecting
company this afternoon, and on Tuesday next we shall
have all the female teachers of the Sunday-school to tea.

" I do hope, my dearest Ellen, that you will return to
school again for your own sake, 'though for mine 1
would rather that you would remain at home, as we
shall then have more frequent opportunities of corre-
spondence with each other. Should your friends decide
against your returning to school, I know you have too
much good sense and right feeling not to strive earnestly
for your own improvement. Your natural abilities are
excellent, and under the direction of a judicious and able
friend (and I know you have many such) you might ac-
quire a decided taste for elegant literature, and, even,
poetry, which, indeed, is included under thatgeneral term.

" I was very much disappointed by your not sending
the hair. You may be sure, my dearest Ellen, that I
would not grudge double postage to obtain it, but 1
must offer the same excuse for not sending you any. My
aunt and sisters desire their love to you. Remember me
kindly to your mother and sisters, and accept all the
fondest expressions of genuine attachment from your
real fi-iend, " Charlotte Bronte.

" P. S. — Remember the mutual promise we made of
a regular correspondence with each other. Excuse all
faults in this wretched scrawl. Give my love to the
Miss Taylors when you see them.

" Farewell, my dear, dear, dear Ellen ! " *

The smile tempted by the prim, elder-
sisterly advice-giving gives way to a sigh
* Shorter's Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle, page 77.

Home Again 87

as the passionate heart speaks out in the
last line of the postscript. It was never
easy for her to unveil the throbbing depths
even to those she loved most fondly.

" She needed her best spirits to say what
was in her heart," writes Mary Taylor
(" Rose Yorke ").

Mary's first visit to the wilds of Haworth
made her acquainted with the aunt of whom
Charlotte never talked to her schoolfellows,
while ready to speak of her father and sis-
ters, and to expatiate upon her brother's
talents. Miss Taylor's conversations with
the admirable spinster may have haunted
Charlotte while she wrote of " Rose
Yorke's " vehement protest against her
mother's domestic training:

" If my Master has given me ten talents, my duty is
to trade with them and make them ten talents more.
Not in the dust of household drawers shall the coin be
interred. I will not deposit it in a broken-spouted tea-
pot and shut it up in a china-closet among tea-things.
I will not commit it to your work-table to be smothered
in piles of oollen whose. 1 will not prison it in the
linen-press to find shrouds among the sheets. Least of
all, will I hide it in a tureen of cold potatoes, to be
ranged with bread, butter, pastry, and ham, on the
shelves of the larder.

" Mother ! the Lord Who gave each of us our talents

88 Charlotte Bronte at Home

will come home some day, and will demand from all an
account. Suffer your daughters, at least, to put their
money to the exchangers, that they may be enabled at
the Master's coming, to pay Him His own with usury.''

" She made her nieces sew with purpose, and without,"
writes .Miss Taylor, " and, as far as possible, discouraged
any other culture. She used to keep the girls sewing
on charity clothing, and maintained to me that it was
not for the good of the recipients, but of the sewers.
' It was proper for them to do it,' she said."

There is meaning, and much of it, in the
words, " she maintained to me." The in-
dependent girl of advanced ideas must have
had more than one passage-at-arms with a
spinster of the old school, resolute in the
refusal to see any good in " views and in-
novations." Ellen Nussey ingratiated her-
self with the unbending mentor of fancies
and follies at her first visit to Haworth.
Charlotte's letter to her dearest friend,
written just after the latter had returned
home, has a joyous bound of spirits un-
usual in her speech or correspondence.
Mary's experience with her aunt may have
made her nervous as to the effect Ellen
might produce.

" Papa and aunt are continually adducing you as an
example for me to shape my actions and behaviour by,"
she says, gaily. "Emily and Anne say 'they never

r
I-
cc
O

<

I

Brother and Sisters 89

saw anyone they liked so well as you.' And Tabby,
whom you have fascinated, talks a great deal more non-
sense about your ladyship than I care to repeat."

Uneventful though they were, a grey
dead level of prosaic living that would have
been intolerable to one used to town or
g^y country society, 1 think those three
years — when Charlotte Bronte taught her
sisters, sewed dutifully under her aunt's
direction, and found, according to her own
statement, "the two great pleasures and
relaxations of her day " in drawing and
walks up the heathery slopes of the moors
— were the serenest period of her life.

" IVly home is humble and unattractive to strangers,
but to me it contains wliat I shall find nowhere else in
tlie world, — the profound, the intense affection which
brothers and sisters feel for each other when their minds
are cast in the same mould, their ideas drawn from the
same source ; when they have clung to each other from
childhood, and when disputes have never sprung up to
divide them."

Thus she wrote out of the fulness of an
aching heart when the happy home party
was broken up by events that projected a
shadow over the year 1834-5.

1 use the word "shadow " mindfully, for
at this turning of her life, the figure of her

90 Charlotte Bronte at Home

brother is brought, for the first time, boldly
into the foreground. He was next to her
in age, being now nearly eighteen, but a
year younger than Charlotte and a year
older than Emily. Had the whole family
entered into a league and covenant to spoil
the only boy, the evil work could not have
been more thoroughly done. Charlotte's
letters show that she had her full share,
perhaps more than any of the others, in
puffing him up with conceit of his talents,
and, as an inevitable sequitiir with a weak,
vain, passionate, provincial lad, inoculat-
ing him with a despicable contempt for
the women of the household, and tolerant
patronage of his father. Mr. Bronte taught
his son Latin, Greek, and mathematics in
the same antiquated manner in which the
daughters were instructed. Other educa-
tion he had none beyond what he got at
the Haworth Grammar School, and picked
up in the Parsonage study and at the in-
different circulating library in the neighbour-
hood. Like his sisters, he wrote poems,
tales, tragedies, and essays, took lessons in
drawing, and practised what of the art he
had acquired. One and all, they thought
him handsome. Charlotte speaks of his

Brother and Sisters 91

" noble face and forehead," and says that
"Nature favoured him with a fairer out-
side, as well as a fairer constitution, than
his sisters." Not one of his adoring kins-
people doubted his genius. It is enigmati-
cal to the critic of the vapid verse, the turgid
tragedies, the trite prose, treasured by him-
self, and after his death by his sisters, how
even love could have been so pitiably
deceived.

"The clever one of the family," is the
verdict of townspeople, dazzled by the tin-
sel of what Charlotte's " cleverality " fitly
denotes. Superficial and flashy in convers-
ation, he was undeniably heavy with the
pen. In the persuasion that his talents
needed but to be known to be appreciated
by the public at large, he sought sponsor-
ship from Coleridge and Wordsworth,
receiving small encouragement from either.
It would have been strange had any other
result followed the perusal of such lines as
" 1 '11 lay me down on this marble stone
And set the world aside,
To see upon her ebon throne
The Moon in glory ride.''

Charlotte and Emily were of the " half-
a-dozen people in the world " who, as

92 Charlotte Bronte at Home

Branwell informs Wordsworth, ' ' knew that
he had ever penned a line." Charlotte's
fond faith in his abilities had sustained no
jar when the question came up in the family
council — "What shall we do with our
Genius ? "

Other reasons besides his eighteen years
and bourgeoning talents moved father and
aunt to the opinion that the youth should
be set to work, and without delay. The
Black Bull, a picturesque and ancient hos-
telry, stands just below the church steps,
and within one minute's sharp run from
the gate of the Parsonage. For two hun-
dred and fifty years the tap-room has been
the resort of the social and the thirsty
among the Haworth folk, and for the same
time the succession of landlordship has been
from father to son in one line. Worthy,
respectable men, all of them, who kept as
decent and well-ordered a house as any in
Yorkshire, or in England. There was con-
viviality, but not dissipation, in the gather-
ing, on Saturday nights and other leisure
evenings, of honest cottagers and mill-
hands about the long oaken table em-
browned by a century's usage, and
indented by the heels of innumerable pew-

Brother and Sisters 93

ter flagons. The home-brew of the Black
Bull deserves a reputation that has become
international in the last fifty years. The
most constant habitue of the venerable inn
was seldom the worse for what he had im-
bibed, however long the sitting. Mine
host saw to it that the house was cleared
at a reasonable hour, and never allowed
brawling, however large and promiscuous
the company.

The company was never so well pleased
as when Branwell Bronte — "Patrick" to
his hail-fellow-well-met townsmen — ^sat in
the triangular chair in the warmest corner
of the inn parlour, and told stories and
cracked jokes for the delectation of the
wondering revellers. To the simple souls
he was a miracle of learning and wit. They
extolled him at home, in the mill, in the
market-place, as the prodigy of the region.
When strangers from Bradford, Leeds, or
London passed a night at the Black Bull,
a messenger was despatched to the Parson-
age for the "young maister," who, nothing
loath, as may be imagined, took upon his
facile self the entertainment of the traveller,
and exerted himself to live up to his re-
putation.

94 Charlotte Bronte at Home

A stock story in the Black Bull ripntoire
is how one evening Charlotte's voice was
heard at the front door asking if her brother
were there ; whereupon the boy ran into
the adjoining kitchen and jumped out of a
window into the yard. Some one went for-
ward to meet the young lady, sobering his
face to reply that "Patrick" was not in
the house. When telegraphed that the
coast was clear, Branwell climbed in at
the window and made his bow laughingly
to the applauding crowd. They thought it
no harm to hoodwink the anxious sister.
The boy was doing no wrong, and "it
wor main dull at th' Parsonage for a loively
lad."

It was dull for him, or for any young
person who craved society or other amuse-
ment than books. The girls wrote or
studied all the evening in the parlour. On
the other side of the hall, Mr. Bronte was
busy in his way, and must not be inter-
rupted. Miss Branwell retired early ; even
the kitchen was deserted and dark. In the
profound stillness the ticking of the clock
on the stairs could be heard all over the
house. Nobody called, and nothing ever
happened. A pot-house audience was

Brother and Sisters Qs

preferable to none; the adulation of the
illiterate tickled a palate not naturally over-
delicate. Such ignoble adventures as steal-
ing out of the side door, racing down the
short lane, and leaping into the midst of
the ale-bibbers and smokers with some racy
epigram or saucy salutation, when father
and sisters thought him asleep in his room
above-stairs, quickened young blood and
hurt nobody.

Mr. Bronte was of yeoman stock, and at
no time held himself offensively aloof from
his parishioners. Nevertheless, he was not
insensible to the danger that his weaker son
ran in his present associations, and lent a
willing ear to the proposal brought forward
by Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, that the pro-
mising brother should goto London, be en-
rolled as a pupil in the Royal Academy of
Art, and forthwith set about the accomplish-
ment of the foregone conclusion of be-
coming famous. We catch contagious
enthusiasm from Charlotte's announcement
of the great scheme to Ellen Nussey :

" We are all about to divide, break up, separate. Emily
is going to school, Branwell is going to London, and I am
goingto be a governess ! This last determination I formed
myself, knowing that I should have to take the step

96 Charlotte Bronte at Home

sometime, and ' better sune as syne,' to use tlie Scotch
proverb; and knowing well that Papa would have enough
to do with his limited income, should Branwell be
placed at the Royal Academy, and Emily at Roe Head.

" Where am I going to reside ? you will ask. Within
four miles of you, at a place neither of us is unacquainted
with, being no other than the identical Roe Head men-
tioned above. Yes ! I am going to teach in the very
school where 1 was myself taught. Miss Wooler made
me the offer, and I preferred it to one or two proposals
of private governess-ship which I had before received.
I am sad — very sad — at the thought of leaving home ;
but duty — necessity — these are stern mistresses, who will
not be disobeyed.

' ' Did 1 not once say you ought to be thankful for
your independence ? I felt what 1 said at the time, and
I repeat it now with double earnestness. If anything
would cheer me, it is the idea of being so near you.
Surely, you and Polly will come and see me ; it would
be wrong in me to doubt it ; you were never unkind
yet. Emily and 1 leave home on the 27th of this month
[July]. The idea of being together consoles us both
somewhat, and, truth, since I must enter a situation,
' My lines have fallen in pleasant places.' i both love
and respect Miss Wooler."

CHAPTER VIII

EMILY BRONTE — CHARLOTTE'S GOVERNESS-SHIP

UP to the date of Charlotte Bronte's gov-
erness-ship at Roe Head, her sister
Emily is as little conspicuous in the house-
hold group as Anne — " gentle and loving,"
to borrow Sarah De Garrs's words, "ac-
knowledging her sisters as her superiors
in all things."

With this, her second absence from home,
certain peculiarities of Emily's become
evident and pronounced. Mary Taylor had
seen in her a slim, long-limbed girl, taller
than her sisters, and so reserved as to ap-
pear repellent. Mrs. Gaskell draws a just
distinction between her reserve and Anne's
shyness:

"Shyness would please, if it knew how.
Reserve is indifferent whether it pleases or
not."

7 97

98 Charlotte Bronte at Home

It is well known that Emily was Char-
lotte's best-beloved sister. Shirley was
the writer's ideal of "what Emily Bronte
would have been, had she been placed in
health and prosperity."

No visitor who is now admitted to Ha-
worth Rectory fails to pause to look at the
narrow well at the foot of the crooked stair-
case leading from first to second storey.
Keeper — the bulldog Tartar of Shirley —
was Emily's guard abroad and familiar at
home.

"A blow is what he is not used to, and
will not take ! " exclaims Shirley, as the
Irish curate raises his cane against the
"black-muzzled, tawny dog."

The gift of Keeper to Emily was coupled
with a like warning.

"He is peaceable enough unless he is
struck. Then he is dangerous," said the
former owner. Emily was on such good
terms with all her dumb pets — cats, chick-
ens, and dogs — that the big, faithful fel-
low was long with her before the trial-day
for both came. His one bad habit was to
jump upon the most comfortable bed he
could find, for his daily siesta, a trick of
which neither scolding nor argument could

Emily Bronte 99

break him. When discovered at last by
Tabby in the middle of the bed in the
guest-chamber, Emily engaged to punish
him as he deserved. Without a word,
she marched straight to the room, seized
the culprit by the loose skin on the back
of his neck, and dragged him down the
steps, he growling all the way and pulling
back with all his might. At the foot of the
staircase she pushed him hard into the nar-
row nook behind the newel-post, and beat
him on the head and jaws with her clenched
fist until he cowered, conquered, at her
feet.

Charlotte told the rest of the story, alter-
ing scene and names:

' ' She had not a word for anybody else during the
rest of the day ; but sat near the hall-fire till evening,
watching and tending Tartar, who lay all gory, stiff,
and swelled, on a mat at her feet. She wept furtively
over him sometimes, and murmured the softest words of
pity and endearment, in tones whose music the old,
scarred, canine warrior acknowledged by licking her
hand, or her sandal, alternately with his own red
wounds."

Emily's love of dogs had nearly proved
fatal to her at one time, and this accident,
also, Charlotte incorporated in Shirley.

100 Charlotte Bronte at Home

Standing at the kitchen door, opening
upon the lane, Emily saw a tramp cur trot-
ting toward her, panting hoarsely, his
tongue lolling low and long from his jaws.
Supposing that he was suffering from the
heat of the day, she ran back into the
kitchen for a pail of water, and carried it
out to him. In setting it down, she offered
to pat his head, speaking soothingly to
him. Instead of drinking, the brute snapped
at her bare arm, drawing the blood with
his teeth, then ran madly down the street.

Emily had left the ironing-board to look
out of the door. Without calling for help,
she went back into the kitchen, and snatched
the hottest iron from the fire, a slender rod
used in crimping. The tip was a clear
scarlet ; she bored it well into the little
wounds, drew down her sleeve over the
scarified spot, and did not speak of it, even
to Charlotte, until nine days had passed,
and she thought the danger over.

Charlotte was reticent unless when moved
to expression by deep feeling. Emily was
always taciturn. Her sisters understood
her in her dumbest moods. She did not care
who else misapprehended her. It is mar-
vellous how little is known of her personal

Emily Bronte loi

traits and habits, witli all the keen research
instigated by admiration of the rare genius
displayed in her one published book,
IVuthering Heights. If she wrote letters
they were not preserved by the recipients;
she had no intimates except her sisters
and, until his fall, her brother. A friend,
who had seen as much of her as anyone
not of her name and blood, told Mrs. Gas-
kell that " she never showed regard to any
human creature. All her love was reserved
for animals."

At Cowan Bridge she was the youngest
pupil, and petted by the school. 1 fancy
that this was her only experience of such
fondling and indulgence as would right-
fully fall to the lot of a pretty five-year-oId
girl in such circumstances.

Sarah De Garrs says of her at that age :
"She was the only one of the children who
ever required a hint as to forgotten boot-
laces, or a soiled pinafore, and then only
when there was an interesting book in the
way." Of her as a woman, the same at-
tached friend asks, "How can I describe
the master-spirit of the talented trio } Will
her character ever be fully apprehended ? "

Her humble neighbours knew her by

102 Charlotte Bronte at Home

sight, of course, but those who survive
have less to tell than of the others. " She
kept herself much to herself, and had little
to say to anybody," — sums up their re-
miniscences. One told me that "some
thought her the prettiest of the girls." For
his part, he "did not call her handsome,
but she was, so to speak, ' high-looking.' "
In a company exceeding in number Char-
lotte's two or three friends, whose repeated
visits accustomed the inmates of the house
to their presence, Emily was awkward and
constrained, making no effort to put others,
or herself, at ease. On the moors — her
head up and nostrils dilated, like a deer-
hound that scents the game, her dogs at
her heels — her step was free and swift, her
carriage graceful. Thus Charlotte saw her
in the mirror of her mind when she begins
a letter to her, " Mine own bonnie love."

With all her love of nature and outdoor
life, she was, par excellence, the niece
whose housewifely skill did most honour
to Miss Branwell's training. She did all the
ironing, and most of the baking, besides
bearing an important part in such scenes as
Charlotte reviews in another letter to her
favourite sister :

Emily Bronte 103

" I should like uncommonly to be in the dining-room
at home, or in the kitchen, or in the back kitchen. I
should like even to be cutting up the hash, and you
standing by, watching that I put enough flour, not too
much pepper, and, above all, that 1 save the best pieces
of the leg of mutton for Tiger and Keeper, the first of
vv'hich personages would be jumping about the dish and
carving-knife, and the latter standing like a devouring
flame on the kitchen floor. To complete the picture.
Tabby blowing the fire in order to boil the potatoes to a
sort of vegetable glue. How divine are these recollec-
tions to me at this moment ! "

"Emily is going to school !" — Charlotte
had said it jubilantly, and spoken hopefully
of the comfort they would be to one an-
other at Roe Head. At the close of the
first quarter, the elder sister wrote urgently
to her father to lay his commands upon
Emily to return to Haworth. The eagle
pined in the poultry-yard. From the first
day of text-books, classes, and schoolroom
hours, the girl was appetiteless and hag-
gard ; homesickness in its worst form
seized upon her. Ashamed of the weak-
ness, she threw herself furiously upon her
studies, — wrought at the novel tasks as for
her life. Charlotte tells with what result :

" In this struggle her health was quickly
broken. Her white face, attenuated form,

104 Charlotte Bronte at Home

and failing strength threatened rapid decline.
Her nature proved too strong for her
fortitude."

Back at home, with the great, unbroken
hollow of the sky above her, the wind from
twenty miles of treeless moorland in her
face, she rallied quickly, and tried to atone
for the failure to secure such an education
as other young women of her station re-
ceived. The line of study prescribed at
school was pursued indefatigably. She
conned her German grammar while she
kneaded the dough for the semi-weekly
baking, the book propped up before her,
out of reach of flour-dust or spatter of
yeast. Whatever her employment, a book
was ever within reach. How well she
succeeded in equipping the ardent intellect
discriminating critics never weary of telling.

Branwell was again in Haworth almost
as soon as Emily. For some mysterious
reason he did not enter the Royal Academy.
Either the specimens of his work exhibited
to the committee of inspection were un-
satisfactory, or, as is generally suspected, he
squandered the stipend allowed him by his
father, and Mr. Bronte cut off further sup-
plies. He would probably have thrown

Charlotte's Governess-ship 105

himself away had he stayed in London
and been set to work at the art he loved,
or believed that he loved. Moral and physi-
cal ruin was made certain by the life he led
as gentleman-at-large in Haworth, painting
when he felt like it, carousing at the Black
Bull, writing rhymes by the ream, and gun-
ning on the moors with the sons of small
squires and mill-owners.

But for the solicitude on his account that
could not but steal over her spirits as news
of his idleness reached her, Charlotte would
have been as peacefully contented at Roe
Head as she could be anywhere away from
Haworth. Ellen Nussey's home, " Brook-
royd," was within walking distance, as was
the Taylors', and Miss Woolers thoughtful
kindness made frequent intercourse a pleas-
ant possibility. We hear of Sundays spent
with both families ; of parcels tossed over
the wall on Huddersfield Market-day as
one of the Nussey or Taylor brothers
"whirled past" the enclosed playground
in sight of Charlotte's window. Her duties
were not onerous ; her pupils liked her and
studied satisfactorily ; she had the affection-
ate confidence of her employer, and her
moderate salary clothed herself and Anne.

io6 Charlotte Bronte at Home

Ellen Nussey paid a visit to the Parsonage
during the midsummer holidays ; there
were long summer afternoons among the
heathery hills, then in their beautiful gar-
ments of royal purple, and merry evenings
in the home parlour, and, thanks to the
gentle magic of the guest's tact, many
really natural girlish confidences ; — and the
weeks of relaxation were flown. Ellen
went home, Charlotte to begin the term of
1836-37 with' Miss Woolen

Branwell had set up a studio, without
waiting for further instruction, and was
painting portraits, sometimes going to Brad-
ford to wait upon sitters. If those in the
Bronte Museum at Haworth are fair speci-
mens of his work, it is astonishing that he
ever obtained a second order after the first
picture was completed. They are sixteenth-
rate as to execution, tasteless as to concep-
tion and style.

An important change in its consequences
to Charlotte was made by Miss Wooler in
1836. She removed her school to Dews-
bury Moor, a handsome building three miles
from cozy Roe Head, and upon much lower
ground. Miasma, or some kindred evil,
told almost immediately upon Charlotte's

Charlotte's Governess-ship 107

health and spirits. She had darkly morbid
fancies, confided partially to Ellen, whose
"mild, steady friendship consoled her,
however bitterly she sometimes felt toward
other people." Emily had made another
desperate effort to conquer nature in taking
a place as pupil-teacher in a Halifax school,
and the " appalling account " Charlotte re-
ceived of her duties there added to the
elder sister's depression.

" Hard labour from six in the morning to
eleven at night, with only one half-hour of
exercise between. This is slavery ! 1 fear
she can never stand it."

A long breathing-spell blessed them at
Christmas ; a holiday made memorable, ,
we are told by Mrs. Gaskell, by an ex-
change of confidences on the part of the
sisters with respect to plans they had
formed and fostered of publishing some of
the many things they had written. At
this date we have also the first mention of
a custom kept up by the sisters as long as
life lasted for each of them. Their aunt
went to her room at nine o'clock, leaving
the girls at liberty to spend the rest of the
evening as they pleased. Even then the
methodical habits drilled into them from

io8 Charlotte Bronte at Home

their birth prevailed above inclination.
They studied, or wrote, or sewed until the
hall-clock struck ten, before work was put
aside. If the fire in the pinched grate, but
half the size of that which now fills its
place, were low, they left a candle burning
upon the table. If there were firelight
enough to show the dim outlines of furni-
ture and figures, they put out the candles
"for economy's sake," and locking arms,
paced around the room, up and down,
backward and forward, while pouring out
their hearts to one another. 1 think the
half-light would have been preferred to
illumination had frugality been less expe-
dient. Reserve was strong second nature
by now, and confidences were impractic-
able, even with those they loved best, when
eyes searched the speaker's face, and
changing expression was the thermometer
of emotion.

People who met Charlotte as a celebrity
speak of her way of turning away from her
interlocutor as she talked, gradually shift-
ing her position until she sat sideways in
her chair, a mannerism due to early seclu-
sion and attendant bashfulness.

The friendly glooms of the quiet parlour

Charlotte's Governess-ship 109

favoured free discussion of past failures,
present perplexities, and the possibilities of
the future. Charlotte and Emily were gov-
ernesses because there was no other way
open by which they could earn a living ;
Anne was to go back with Charlotte to
Miss Wooler's as a pupil, to prepare for
the same profession — hateful to all three,
to Emily insupportable. They detested
teaching ; they loved to write. With each
the pen was a fuller outlet of feeling and
thought than the tongue ; the Open Sesame
to the wide, beautiful world of " things not
seen " they had made for themselves as a
retreat from, and a solace for, the narrow
sordidness of visible and temporal things.
At the suggestion that they might live by,
as well as in, the exercise of the gifts they
acknowledged to themselves and to each
other, their souls took fire. In the audac-
ity of their excitement they resolved to
take the first great step in the road they, in
their unworldliness, conceived would lead
to success. Charlotte was commissioned
to ask counsel of the Poet Laureate, Robert
Southey. He had climbed the heights and
could tell them whether or not they might
adventure hill and pass. They knew him

1 10 Charlotte Bronte at Home

by reputation to be gentle of heart and
kindly of disposition. He would conde-
scend to tyros of low estate.

The momentous letter, so carefully pre-
pared as to seem stilted to the verge of
bombast, was despatched on the twenty-
ninth of December, 1836.

Emily had been slaving beyond her
strength in the Halifax school ; Charlotte
bearing with what patience will and religion
gave her the sickness of hope deferred,
while teaching the youngest girls at Miss
Wooler's ; Anne's timid sweetness had
made friends of teachers and scholars —
when, early in March, Mr. Southey's answer
was forwarded from Haworth to Dews-
bury Moor.

It was kind, it was sensible,- — from the
standpoint of a disinterested critic who
knew nothing of his correspondent beyond
what her letter told him, — and it was frank.
Absence from home had delayed his letter.
Nor was it "an easy task to answer it, nor
a pleasant one to cast a damp over the high
spirits and the generous desires of youth."

(Poor Charlotte ! did the wording of the
merciful preamble smite her as a bitter
irony ?)

Charlotte's Governess-ship 1 1 1

The Laureate prosed on platitudinally,
with faint praise of the verses she had en-
closed, with warnings as to the peril of
day-dreams and romantic expectations,
until he reached the pith of the commun-
ication.

" Literature cannot be the business of a woman's life,
and it ought not to be. The more she is engaged in her
proper duties, the less leisure will she have for it, even as
an accomplishment and a recreation. To those duties
you have not yet been called, and when you are, you
will be less eager for celebrity. You will not seek in
imagination for excitement, of which the vicissitudes of
this life, and the anxieties from which you must not
hope to be exempted, be your state what it may, will
bring with them but too much.

" Write poetry for its own sake — not in a spirit of
emulation, and not with a view to celebrity. The less
you aim at that, the more likely you will be to deserve,
and finally to attain it. So written it is wholesome,
both for the heart and soul. It may be made the surest
means, next to Religion, of soothing the mind and
elevating it. You may embody in it your best thoughts
and your wisest feelings, and, in so doing, discipline and
strengthen them."

When the logic of events — often ruthless,
sometimes, thank Heaven! gracious and
compensatory — had proved the worthless-
nessofthe great one's advice, Charlotte said

1 12 Charlotte Bronte at Home

of his letter: "It was kind and admirable. A
little stringent, but it did me good."

I wish a just sense of the proportions to
be observed in this biography warranted
the insertion of every line of her reply to
the death-knell of her fondest hopes and
happiest aspirations. I cannot deny my
reader the perusal, and myself a repetition,
of a part of it :

" At the first perusal of your letter, I felt only shame
and regret that I had ever ventured to trouble you with
my crude rhapsody. I felt a painful heat rise to my face
when I thought of the quires of paper 1 had covered with
what once gave me so much delight, but which now was
only a source of confusion. But after 1 had thought a
little, and read it again and again, the prospect seemed
to clear. You do not forbid me to write ; you do not say
that what 1 write is utterly destitute of merit. You only
warn me against the folly of neglecting real duties for the
sake of imaginative pleasures. You kindly allow me to
write poetry for its own sake, provided I leave undone
nothing which I ought to do, in order to pursue that sin-
gle, absorbing, exquisite giatification.

' ' 1 trust I shall never more feel ambitious to see my
name in print. If the wish should rise, 1 '11 look at
Southey's letter and suppress it. It is honour enough for
me that I have written to him, and received an answer.
That letter is consecrated. No one shall ever see it, but
Papa and my brother and sisters. Again, 1 thank you !
This incident, 1 suppose, will be renewed no more. If

Charlotte's Governess-ship 1 1 3

I live to be an old woman, I shall remember it, thirty
years hence, as a bright dream."

In this remarkable epistle — the English of
which is stronger than Southey could have
written, while the spirit has the grave sim-
plicity of a child — the woman and daughter
put herself upon record.

Southey was so much touched by it that
he wrote again, inviting her to visit him
should she ever find herself in his neigh-
bourhood, and counselling her to avoid
over-excitement, and to keep a quiet mind.
"Your moral and spiritual improvement
will then keep pace with the culture of
your intellectual powers."

Humane and patronising moralist! Let
us be glad, for his sake, that he never sus-
pected what flinty particles were kneaded
up in the comely loaf he bestowed upon a
half-starved soul.

CHAPTER IX

DEWSBURY MOOR — FIRST OFFER OF MARRIAGE

EMILY remained in Halifax half a year,
a period of exquisite suffering borne
dumbly and without a struggle. Finally
her health succumbed to the strain, and
the fiat went forth. She must go back to
Haworth if she would not be permanently
invalided. There was work in abundance
for her there. Tabby had had a serious
accident that lamed her for life, and Miss
Branwell was growing old. Branwell was
painting, idling, and drinking. Anne was
still at school, and Charlotte was the only
breadwinner besides her father. In spite
of the (to her) unsalubrious air of Dews-
bury Moor, she stood valiantly at her post
for two years, keeping her word to Mr.
Southey and seeking, in conscientious per-
formance of "her proper duties," to dull
114

Dewsbury Moor 1 1=5

the ceaseless longing to be something more
than an automaton, to do something higher
than mix and administer mental pap for
babes.

In mid-May of 1838, the month when
bird-songs were sweetest and the spring-
ing heather at its tenderest green on the
dear moors, Miss Wooler insisted upon
calling in medical advice for her young as-
sistant. The girl's nerves — not her nerve
— ^were giving out. She was semi-hyster-
ical after the day's work was done; she
was a prey to insomnia; she could not eat.
The physician spoke plainly to Miss Wooler.
Miss Bronte's life and reason were in dan-
ger. She was fairly worn out. In modern
technical phrase, she was on the verge of
nervous prostration. But one thing could
save her. She must have rest and change,
and these in the breezy uplands for which
she pined.

In June she wrote to Ellen Nussey of
dawning convalescence:

" A calm and even mind like yours cannot conceive
the feelings of the shattered wretch who is now writing
to you when, after weeks of mental and bodily anguish
not to be described, something like peace began to dawn
again. My health and spirits had utterly failed me, and

1 1 6 Charlotte Bronte at Home

the medical man whom I consulted, enjoined me, as I
valued my life, to go home."

At Mr. Bronte's earnest invitation, the
two Taylor sisters paid a visit to their
friend the first week in June. Mary was
not well, but Martha "kept up a continual
flow of good humour during her stay, and
has, consequently, been very fascinating."

The brightest picture we have of Ha-
worth home life is given in this letter
written in the family sitting-room. Mary
Taylor is, Charlotte says, at the piano ;
Martha, vivacious, piquante, and restless,
is talking animatedly to Branwell, as he
stands before her, looking laughingly down
into her face. We have no other view of
the weak and facile son of the house half
so pleasing as this.

It must have been during this tranquil
year spent by all three sisters at home, ex-
cept for Charlotte's occasional visits to the
Nusseys and Taylors, that the picture was
painted of which I secured a rough photo-
graph in Haworth. I was there assured
that the original was painted by Branwell
Bronte, although no mention is made of it
by that most careful of the Bronte chron-
iclers, Professor Clement Shorter. The

Family Scenes 1 17

workmanship is atrocious, but people who
knew the family say the likenesses are so far
worthy of the name that they can be iden-
tified. Charlotte sits at her brother's
right hand, Emily next to her, and Anne
alone at the other end of the table. Bran-
well's sporting propensities are characteris-
tically indicated by the fowling-piece and
game. His social ambitions lay in the direc-
tion of the country gentleman, and these
tastes were not lessened by the poor emin-
ence accorded him by the illiterate con-
stituency of the tap-room.

A worthy Thornton shoemaker, formerly
a resident of Haworth, and who made
shoes for the Brontes as long as he lived
there, told me an anecdote illustrative of
the flashiness the weak young fellow mis-
took for dash :

" He would be about eighteen when 1 made him the
boots I mind of. Most folk, at that day, had boots
made to coom up to the knee — some above the knee.
Top-boots, you know. Patiick Bronte would have his
lower to wear with gaiters for hunting on the moors,
and the like. 1 made the pair, and when he put thim
on, they wor a bit toight in the instep and aboot th'
ankle. And, with that, before I could say a word to
tell him I 'd stretch thim, he whipped oot his jack-knife
and cut thim open. Ah ! he wor a rare one ! "

1 1 8 Charlotte Bronte at Home

Plain common-sense reminds us that a
lad who was not earning enough to pay
his board, and whose father was growing
old and had three daughters to be provided
for, was inhuman, as well as extravagant,
in slashing into what his father must pay
for. The reckless bit of folly fastened the
incident in the shoemaker's mind, and the
air with which it was done moved him to
admiration rather than reprobation.

Branwell and Emily were left at home
when gentle Anne took a place as govern-
ess in April, 1839, and Charlotte entered the
family of Mr. Sidgwick, a wealthy country
gentleman at Stonegappe, Yorkshire.

Anne's experience is condensed into one
sentence in a confidential letter from Char-
lotte to Ellen Nussey: " You could never
live in an unruly, violent family of children
such as those at Ingham Hall."

Her own engagement was temporary, to
fill the place of the regular governess, who
had leave of absence for three months.
Charlotte congratulated herself upon this
circumstance after a short trial of the situa-
tion. Her employer was a hard, haughty
parvenue, who "overwhelmed her with
oceans of needlework, yards of cambric to

o ?

As Private Governess 1 19

hem, muslin night-caps to make, and dolls
to dress."

"1 see now, more clearly than I have
ever done before, that a private governess
has no existence, is not considered as a
living, and rational, being except as con-
nected with the wearisome duties she has
to fulfil," she breaks out bitterly. A sig^
nificant caution follows in the latter part
of the letter: "Don't show this to Papa
or Aunt, but only to ^raiiwell. They will
think 1 am never satisfied wherever 1 am.
1 complain to you because it is a relief, and
really 1 have had some unexpected mor-
tifications to put up with."

A week later she asks Ellen to

' ' imagine the miseries of a reserved wretch thrown at once
into the midst of a large family, proud as peacocks and
rich as Jews, at a time when they were particularly
gay, when the house was filled with company — all
strangers. .

" At first 1 was for giving up all and going home. But
after ^ little reflection I said to myself, — ' 1 had never
quitted a place without gaining a friend ; adversity is a
good school ; the poor are born to labour and the de-
pendent to endure.' . 1 recollected the fable of
the willow and the oak. I bent quietly, and now 1
trust the storm is blowing over. 1 have no
wish to be pitied except by yourself."

120 Charlotte Bronte at Home

It was the mistress of this family who,
when one of her children impulsively threw
his arms about his teacher's neck with,
"I Ime ou, Miss Bronte!" ejaculated re-
provingly, " Fie ! love the governess, my
dear ! "

"The dreary 'gin-horse' round," as she
calls governessing, may have been the
more intolerable for an opportunity offered
her, just before she accepted the proposal
to go to the Sidgwicks, of escaping at
once, and forever, from a life which she
abhorred and dreaded.

Henry Nussey, a young clergyman, the
brother of her dearest friend, asked her to
marry him. The letter in which the de-
claration of his regard was made was, as
she afterward told his sister, "written
without cant or flattery, and in a common-
sense style which does credit to his judg-
ment."

With the looming horror of a "situa-
tion" before her, she answered the hon-
ourable gentleman she would retain as a
friend, kindly and candidly:

" 1 have no personal repugnance to the idea of a
union with you, but I feel convinced that mine is not
the sort of disposition calculated to form the happiness

First Offer of Marriage 121

of a man like you. . You do not know me. 1

am not the serious, grave, cool-headed individual you
suppose. You would think me romantic and eccentric.
You would say I was satirical and severe. However, I
scorn deceit, and I will never, for the sake of attaining
the distinction of matrimony and escaping the stigma of
an old maid, take a worthy man whom 1 am conscious
I cannot render happy."

In this sisterly epistle she sketches what
manner of woman he ought to marry, evi-
dently with a view to presenting a being
utterly antipodal to herself :

"Her character should not be too
marked, ardent, and original ; her temper
should be mild, her piety undoubted, her
spirits even and cheerful, and her personal
attractions sufficient to please your eyes
and gratify your just pride."

The italics are her own, and indicate
what was ever patent to her friends — an
exaggerated sense of her homely face and
ill-assured manner.

To Ellen, to whom her brother had con-
fided his attachment and intended proposal,
Charlotte wrote yet more plainly :

" There were in this proposal some things which
might have proved a strong temptation. I thought if 1
were to marry Henry Nussey his sister could live with
me, and how happy 1 should be. But again I asked

122 Charlotte Bronte at Home

myself two questions : Do I love him as much as a
woman ought to love the man she marries ? Am I the
woman best qualified to make him happy ? Alas ! Ellen,
my conscience answered no to both those questions. I
felt that, though I esteemed, though 1 had a kindly
leaning toward him because he is an amiable and well-
disposed man, yet I had not, and could not have, that
intense attachment which would make me willing to die
for him ; and, if ever I marry, it must be in that light of
adoration that I will regard my husband.

" Ten to one I shall never have the chance again — but
n'importe !

" Moreover, I was aware that Henry knew so little
of me he could hardly be conscious to whom he was
writing. Why, it would startle him to see me in my
natural home-character. He would think 1 was a wild,
romantic enthusiast indeed. 1 could not sit, all day long,
making a grave face before my husband. 1 would
laugh and satirise, and say whatever came into my head
first. And, if he were a clever man and loved me, the
whole world weighed in the balance against his smallest
wish should be light as air. Could 1, knowing my mind
to be such as that, conscientiously say that I would take
a grave, quiet young man like Henry ? No ! it would
have been deceiving him, and deception of that sort is
beneath me." *

Before leaving the subject of this, her first
offer of marriage, it is well to state that in six
months she was called upon to write a letter
to Mr. Nussey, congratulatory upon his
engagement to another woman, and that
* Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle, page 297.

Offers of Marriage 123

he always remained her steadfast friend.
She was a welcome guest at his house, and
both parties to the quiet transaction in
hearts seem to have been one in the desire
to feel and act as if it had never ruffled the
current of their intercourse.

In a very different strain she describes to
Ellen a visit from a young Irish curate —

" witty, lively, ardent, clever, too, but deficient in
the dignity and discretion of an Englishman. At home,
you know, 1 talk with ease, and am never shy —
never weighed down and oppressed by the miserable
inauvaise haute which torments and constrains me else-
where. So 1 conversed with this Irishman and laughed
at his jests."

In effect she made herself so agreeable
that she received by post a few days after
his one and only visit

" a declaration of attachment and proposal of matri-
mony, expressed in the ardent language of the sapient
young Irishman.

" I hope you are laughing heartily ? This is not like
one of my adventures, is it ? It more nearly resembles
Martha's ["Jessie Yorke"]. 1 am certainly doomed to
be an old maid. Never mind ! I made up my mind to
that fate ever since I was twelve years old. "

A letter bearing date of May 15, 1840,
almost a year after she had dismissed her
two suitors, fits in well here :

124 Charlotte Bronte at Home

" Do not be over-persuaded to marry a man you can
never respect — I do not say love, because 1 think if you
can respect a person before marriage, moderate love, at
least, will come after ; and as to intense passion, 1 am
convinced that that is no desirable feeling. In the first
place it seldom, or never meets with a requital, and in
the second place, if it did, the feeling would be only
temporary. It would last the honeymoon, and then,
perhaps give place to disgust, or indifference — worse,
perhaps, than disgust. Certainly this would be the case
on the man's part ; — and, on the woman's — God help
her, if she is left to love passionately and alone !

" 1 am tolerably well convinced that 1 shall never
marry at all. Reason tells me so, and I am not so utterly
the slave of feeling but that 1 can occasionally hear her
voice."

The year had passed quietly, but neither
idly nor unhappily. Tabby's confirmed
lameness obliged her to leave her situation
and go to stay for a while with her sister.
Charlotte and Emily did all the housework
with no servant except a little errand-girl
from the school in the lane near the Parson-
age. To Charlotte fell the chamber- work, —
" blackleading the stoves, making the beds,
and sweeping the floors, " — with the ironing.
The first time she undertook the latter task
she burned the clothes ; afterward she be-
came an adept. Emily was cook and
baker.

New Plans isi^

" I am much happier than I should be living like a
fine lady anywhere else," Charlotte affirmed, " Yet — 1
intend to force myself to take another situation when 1
can get one, though 1 hate and abhor the very thoughts
of governess-ship. But I must do it, and therefore 1
heartily wish I could hear of a family where they need
such a commodity as a governess."

The faultless system of housewifery
learned from the aunt, and the simple
habits of a family that had no visitors, left
the sisters several hours of each day for
writing and out-of-door exercise. In the
winter of 1839-40 they conceived and dis-
cussed a scheme which, although it never
took the shape they wished it to assume,
was to exert a powerful influence upon
their fortunes.

Anne was to be recalled, and the three
sisters would open a home-school for girls
in some ehgible town not far from Ha-
worth. The project formed the staple of
the dialogues held in the parlour when the
seniors were in bed, and the candles were
extinguished to save expense, and the only
sound in the old house besides the moan-
ing wind and the ticking of the hall-clock
was the soft, measured tread over the floor
of the two whose restless shadows crossed
the fire-lighted space about the pinched

126 Charlotte Bronte at Home

grate to blend with moveless shadows in
the corners of the room. The cherished
project promised so little that Charlotte
was, all the while, on the lookout for
another situation.

She wrote of a dim prospect of an en-
gagement for herself, and of a certain open-
ing for Branwell, late in the summer of
1840:

" A woman of the name of B , it seems, wants a

teacher. I wish she would have me, and I have written
to Miss Wooler to tell her so. Verily, it is a delightful
thing to live here at home, with full liberty to do just
what one pleases. But 1 recollect some scrubby old fable
about grasshoppers and ants by a scrubby old knave
yclept /Esop. The grasshoppers sang all the summer,
and starved all the winter.

' ' A distant relation of mine — one Patrick Branwell —
has set off to seek his fortune in the wild, wandering,
adventurous, romantic, knight-errant-like capacity of
clerk on the Leeds and Manchester Railroad. Leeds
and Manchester — where are they ? Cities in the wilder-
ness, like Tadmor, alias Palmyra — are they not?"

In the same letter we have a leaf from
the record of Charlotte's parish-work and
interesting incidents touching upon her as-
sociation with her father's curates while
thus engaged. Mr. Weightman, supposed
by some to have been the suggestion of

The Curates 127

little Mr. Sweeting, in Shirley, has given
her a pleasant surprise in the discovery of
his goodness to one of her Sunday-school
girls. Calling upon the girl, she

"found her on her way to that ' bourn whence no trav-
eller returns,' and inquiry into her wants elicited the in-
formation that Mr. Weightman had provided delicacies
for the invalid and that he was ' always good-natured to
poor folks, and seemed to have a deal of feeling and
kind-heartedness about him.'

" God bless him ! " breaks out Charlotte, impulsively,
repentant of sundry jests she and her sisters had passed
upon the natty little fellow. " 1 wonder who, with his
advantages, would be without his faults. I know many
of his faulty actions — many of his weak points ; yet
where I am, he shall always find rather a defender than
accuser."

The admirer of ' ' Shirley " as jaunty "Cap-
tain Keeldar" will like to know that Emily
Bronte earned the sobriquet of " Major " in
the family circle by guarding Ellen Nussey
from the attentions of "our revered friend,
William Weightman," — so Charlotte rattles
on, — "who is quite as bonny, pleasant,
light-hearted, good-tempered, generous,
careless, fickle, and unclerical as ever." *

Mr. Bradley, a curate in another parish,
* Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle, page 287.

128 Charlotte Bronte at Home

was thought by other friends of the Brontes
to be the original of "Mr. Sweeting of
Nunnely." Mr. Grant, sometime master
of the Haworth Grammar School and Bran-
well's teacher, was "Mr. Donne." Of
"Mr. Malone " we shall hear more, by-
and-by.

CHAPTER X

VARIOUS SCHOOL PROJECTS — " GOING TO BRUS-
SELS " LIFE IN THE PENSIONNAT OF M. AND

MADAME HEGER

1AM, as yet, ' wanting a situation,' like
a housemaid out of place," Charlotte
had said in April, 1839. She did not ob-
tain what she desired, yet "abhorred,"
until the spring of 1841. She had but two
pupils, both under ten years of age. Her
salary was twenty pounds a year, out of
which she was to pay all her expenses ex-
cept board and lodging. The place, Up-
perwood House, Rawdon, the country-seat
of a Mr. White, was a decided improve-
ment upon the temporary engagement with
the Sidgwicks. It is gratifying to have her
testimony to the kindness of her employers
in a letter to Henry Nussey, now resident
at Earnley Rectory, and a married man:

9 129

130 Charlotte Bronte at Home

" We are all separated now, and winning our bread
amongst strangers as we can. My sister Anne is near
York, my brother in a situation near Halifax ; I am here.
Emily is the only one left at home, where her usefulness
and willingness make her indispensable. . 1 do

not pretend to say that I am always contented. A gov-
erness must often submit to have the heartache. My
employers, Mr. and Mrs. White, are kind, worthy peo-
ple in their way, but the children are indulged. 1 have
great difficulties to contend with sometimes. Persever-
ance will perhaps conquer them. And it has gratified
me much to find that the parents are well satisfied with
their children's improvement in learning since I came." *

The school project worked actively in
her mind. Her father and aunt were con-
sulted in the midsummer holidays of 1841,
and did not throw cold water upon it,
much to the sisters' surprise and gratifica-
tion. Miss Bran well went so far as to
promise to advance a hundred pounds for
initial expenses should a good situation be
secured. Burlington was thought of, and
the claims of sundry other places were dis-
cussed in family council and by letter.

" No further steps have been taken about the project
I mentioned to you," she told Ellen Nussey in August,
"but Emily and Anne and 1 keep it in view. It is our
polar star, and we look to it in all circumstances of

* Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle, page 88.

Various School Projects 131

despondency. You will not mention it at

present. A project not actually commenced is always
uncertain."

In this letter she speaks of Mary Taylor's
having gone to Brussels with her brother,
and of her descriptions of

" pictures the most exquisite, cathedrals the most vener-
able. I hardly know what swelled to my throat as I
read her letter — such a strong wish for wings — wings,
such as wealth can furnish ; such an urgent thirst to see,
to know, to learn. Something internal seemed to ex-
pand bodily for a minute. 1 was tantalised by the con-
sciousness of faculties unexercised ; — then, all collapsed
and I despaired !

" My dear ! I would hardly make that confession to
anyone but yourself, and to you, rather in a letter than
viva voce."

Another plan was uppermost in Septem-
ber and early October. Miss Wooler was
giving up her school at Dewsbury Moor.
Would the Brontes take it ? If they were
disposed to do it, were their attainments in
the matter of music and modern languages
such as to warrant the belief that they
could maintain the high tone of the sem-
inary, and attract pupils of the better class ?

More abruptly than she was wont to ad-
dress her best friend, Charlotte wrote,
October 17, 1841 :

1 32 Charlotte Bronte at Home

"lam not going to Dewsbury Moor, as far as I can
see at present. It was a decent, friendly proposal on
Miss Wooler's part ; but Dewsbury Moor is a poisoned
place to me. Besides, 1 burn to go somewhere else. 1
think, Nell, 1 see a chance of getting to Brussels. Mary
Taylor advises me to this step. My own mind and
feelings urge me. I can't write a word more."

The chance of having the wings for
which she had longed hopelessly, came in
the form of a loan from Miss Branwell,
whose annuity of fifty pounds had been
more than sufficient for her modest needs
during her residence at Haworth. She had
husbanded her savings for her nieces, and
Charlotte, aware of this, boldly asked that
fifty, or perhaps one hundred, pounds be
laid out upon them now. Emily was to
go with Charlotte to a Brussels school,
where

" the facilities for education are equal, or superior, to
any other place in Europe.

" If Emily could share them with me, we could take
a footing in the world afterwards which we can never do
now. 1 say, Emily, instead of Anne, for Anne might
take her turn at some future period if our school answaed.
I feel an absolute conviction that, if this ad-
vantage were allowed us, it would be the making of us
for life."

The last sentence quoted was prophetic,
but the mill that brought it to pass ground

"Going to Brussels" 133

slowly, and the product was totally dis-
similar to what the ambitious dreamer
scheduled to herself and her friends.

There is a joyous flutter of spirits in the
letter penned to Ellen in the last month
spent in England before the momentous
flitting :

" Mary has been indefatigable in providing me witli
information. Sfie has grudged no labour, and scarcely
any expense, to that end. Mary's price is above rubies.
I have, in fact, two friends — you and her — staunch and
true, in whose faith and sincerity 1 have as strong a be-
lief as I have in the Bible. I have bothered you both,
you especially ; but you always get the tongs and heap
coals of fire upon my liead. 1 have had letters to write
lately to Brussels, to Lille, and to London. 1 have lots
of chemises, night-gowns, pocket-handl<erchiefs, and
pockets to make, besides clothes to repair. I have been,
every week, since I came home, expecting to see Bran-
well, and he has never been able to get over yet. We
fully expect him, however, next Saturday. Under these
circumstances, how can I go visiting ? You tantalise me
to death, with talking of conversations by the fireside.
Depend upon it, we are not to have any such for many
a long month to come. I get an interesting impression
of old age upon my face, and when you see me next, 1
shall certainly wear caps and spectacles."*

Mary Taylor and her brother (we wish
we knew whether it was "Mark" or

* Shorter's Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle, page 09.

1 34 Charlotte Bronte at Home

"Martin") were returning to the Con-
tinent, and offered to take charge of the
Bronte girls. Mr. Bronte insisted, never-
theless, upon escorting them in person.
The party of five set out from Yorkshire
the second week of February, 1842, spent
a couple of days in London, then pushed on
to Brussels. Mary and Martha Taylor were
to study at the Chateau de Koekelberg, on
the outskirts of the city. The Brontes had
applied for admission at the Pensionnat
of Monsieur and Madame Heger in Rue
d'Isabelle, in the very heart of ancient
Brussels.

The buildings occupied as a day- and
boarding-school were old even then. The
Rue d'Isabelle was an inhabited quarter in
the thirteenth century. A broad flight of
stone steps leads from the gay upper town
to the quieter quarter. In descending these
one sees directly opposite a long row of
white houses, two and three storeys in
height. Between the first and second Stages
of one of the taller is a sign denoting that
an ecole communale (that is, a public school)
is still kept here. What was the Hegers'
private residence has been cut off from the
school-buildings, and the garden in the

Life in the Pensionnat 135

rear of the hollow square of houses is built
up in part.

The arrangement of the schoolrooms
differs somewhat from that of 1842. The
great classe has been cut into smaller re-
ception-rooms, and the dormitories are
disused, all the pupils in attendance upon
the sessions of the school being externes, or
day-scholars.

When the diligence deposited the York-
shire clergyman and his daughters at the
door bearing Madame Heger's name, there
were a hundred girls and a large staff of
teachers in the institution, and all the ma-
chinery of a successful fashionable seminary
of polite learning was in full swing. Brus-
sels is well named "a miniature Paris,"
and Madame Heger's patrons were, for the
most part, prosperous citizens. Charlotte
Bronte drew upon memory, not imagina-
tion, in depicting "Lucy Snowe's " sur-
roundings and associates in Villette. The
book is a marvel, less of creative genius than
of descriptive art. Mr. Shorter says truly,
" With a copy of Villette in hand it is pos-
sible to restore every feature of the place."
The reader who knows Villette and The
Professor needs no information respecting

1^6 Charlotte Bronte at Home

the external features of the place, and little
as to Charlotte's ("Lucy's") employments
and companions.

Let an extract from The Professor outline
these last for such as have read neither
novel :

"The majority belonged to the class bourgeois ; but
there were many countesses, there were the daughters
of two generals and of several colonels, captains, and
government employes. These ladies sat side by side
with young females destined to be demoiselles de
magasin, and with some Flamandes, genuine aborigines
of the country. In dress all were nearly similar, and in
manners there was small difference. Exceptions there
were to the general rule, but the majority gave the tone
to the establishment, and that tone was rough, boister-
ous, marked by a point-blank disregard of all forbearance
towards each other, or their teachers."

Neither book tells the piteous tale of the
Bronte sisters' initiation into their new life.
The rush and the bustle of shifting classes
and of recitations ; the stares of the well-
dressed, well-fed girls herding together at
recess to comment upon the late arrivals ;
the shrill un-English voices chattering like
maniacal parrots, in a jargon as unintel-
ligible to Yorkshire ears as if the strangers
had never "taken" a French lesson; the
crowded table in the refectory ; the foreign

Life in the Pensionnat 137

cookery; the dormitory, furnished with ten
beds on each side of a strait central aisle —
were so many variations of pain and puzzle
to Charlotte and Emily. As a concession
to English reserve, they were permitted to
hang a curtain between their beds at the
far end of the dormitory and the eighteen
small white cots beyond. When the school
was turned out, like wild colts, into the
garden behind the house for the noon exer-
cise, the foreigners, older by eight or ten
years than the eldest Belgian there, walked
together and apart from the rest, in the
vine-draped arbour {berceau) near the wall
on the right of the grounds.

An odd-looking pair they were to friendly,
as to curious, eyes. Their dress, plain to
singularity in Haworth, was biiarre and
ridiculous in the petty Paris. Long after
they were discarded by everybody else,
Emily clung to "mutton-leg" sleeves, full
at the shoulder, baggy down to the elbow,
and thence sloping abruptly to the wrist,
where they fitted closely. Her skirts were
gathered at the belt and hung, straight,
limp, and untrimmed, to the ankle. No
gores or flounces were tolerable in her eyes,
let who would wear the fripperies. Char-

138 Charlotte Bronte at Home

lotte was indifferent to dress, yet Emily's
biographer, Miss Robinson, more than hints
at an effort on her part to conform her
attire to prevailing modes.

"She" — Emily — "would laugh when
she found her elder sister trying to arrange
her homely gowns in the French taste, and
stalk silently through the large schoolrooms
with a fierce satisfaction in her own ugly
sleeves, in the Ha worth cut of her skirts."

In this respect she was unlike the beauti-
ful "Shirley." Emily despised all arts per-
taining to personal adornment. Clothes
were meant to cover the figure and to keep
one warm. Beyond this she had no use
for them. At rising in the morning she
donned the gown she intended to wear all
day, and dressed her hair with the like
view. Arrayed as the loving sister makes
Shirley bedeck herself on fete-days, Emily
might have been comely. Miss Robinson,
after the manner of other biographers, be-
comes her partisan before her fascinating
task is half done. She paints Emily Bronte
at home as

"a tall, lithe creature, with a grace, half queenly, half
untamed, in her sudden, supple movements, wearing,
with picturesque negligence, a white stuff patterned with

Life in the Pensionnat 139

lilac ' thunder and lightning ' ; her face clear and pale ;
her very dark and plenteous brown hair fastened up
behind with a Spanish comb."

To Madame Heger, her teachers, and her
pupils, she was a dowdy, and farouche in
behaviour. If she had comprehended the
voluble French in which they exchanged
witticisms upon her apparel and manners,
she could not have been more obstinately
taciturn. Her moods were almost as in-
clement with two other English girls in the
foreign school. Charlotte, naturally and
habitually shy, made friends. Emily re-
mained a stranger to the last.

M. Heger, faithfully portrayed in VilletU
as " Paul Emmanuel," took especial interest
in his Yorkshire students at an early date
of their acquaintance. Charlotte speaks of
him to Miss Nussey as " a man of power as
to mind, but very choleric and irritable in
temperament." In spicier phrase, she goes
on :

"A little black being, with a face that varies in expres-
sion. Sometimes, he borrows the lineaments of an
insane tom-cat ; sometimes, those of a delirious hyena.
Occasionally, but very seldom, he discards these perilous
attractions and assumes an air not above one hundred
degrees removed from mild and gentlemanlike."

These first impressions were sensibly

140 Charlotte Bronte at Home

modified as his hand opened to her avenues
into the realm of knowledge and research
for which her quickening intellect had pined
through restless, hungry years. "We are
completely isolated in the midst of num-
bers," she records. "Yet 1 think I am
never unhappy. My present life is so de-
lightful, so congenial to my whole nature,
compared to that of a governess ! My
time, constantly occupied, passes too
rapidly."

After the lively sketch of M. Heger al-
ready quoted, and an abstract of the method
of instruction he had chosen for the sisters,
she adds: "Emily and he don't draw
together well at all. Emily works like a
horse, and she has had great difficulties to
contend with — far greater than I have had."

Yet the sagacious master adjudged Emi-
ly's to be the finer mind of the two. His
expressed opinion was to the effect that
"she should have been a man — a great
navigator." Her reason was powerful, and
in grasp sublime ; her turn for logical
demonstration, phenomenal. There was
no love lost between them ; French fire
and English frost were antipathetic to the
last, yet each did justice to the abilities of

Life in the Pensionnat 141

the other. The dogged energy with which
the proud, dumb girl wrought upon tasks
he could not make too arduous for her, or
for ambitious Charlotte, won his respect in
spite of his dislike of Emily's manner and
what he stormed at as obstinate adherence
to her own opinions, particularly when
these were backed up by her principles.

The winter slipped by more swiftly than
they could have believed possible in the
earlier weeks of homesickness and strange-
ness. With the opening of the spring, the
garden was an habitual resort with the
pupils — "the strange, frolicsome, noisy
little world," in which the Brontes moved
without blending with the current of feel-
ing and action. As the days lengthened,

"the house became as merry a place as a school could
be. All day long the broad folding doors and the two-
leaved casements stood wide open ; settled sunshine
seemed naturalised in the atmosphere. . We

lived far more in the garden than under a roof ; classes
were held, and meals partaken of in the ' grand berceaii.' "

Charlotte had learned to speak and write
French with ease and grace, and, under
M. Heger's lead, the wings of her eager
mind had borne her far and high into re-
gions he never thought of tempting his

o

142 Charlotte Bronte at Home

Belgian eleves to enter. Encouraged by
him, siie dared, not merely to think, but to
analyse subjects and to define her independ-
ent conclusions.

Madame Heger was distrusted by the
English girls under her charge, a sentiment
of which one who herself trusted nobody,
should not have complained. She was at-
tractive in person, polished in manner,
acute in mind, fluent in speech, a diplo-
mate born, and endowed with extraordinary
administrative genius. Her surveillance of
school and household was incessant, and
although deftly done, was a secret to none.
The shoes of silence carried her into every
classroom, every dormitory and closet
under her roof, at all hours of day or night.
Monsieur was irritable, fierce, unreason-
able, — but he showed his hand in a fair
game, and said his say in a wordy fight.
Madame asked no questions when she
could, by spying, find out all she wished
to know ; she never scolded, and never
lost her temper.

Madame Beck in Villette was Madame
Heger to the life, and here we have Char-
lotte's masterly analysis of a character she
read through to the last leaf :

Life in the Pensionnat 143

' Madame was a very great, and a very capable
woman. The school offered for her powers too limited
a sphere. She ought to have swayed a nation ; she
should have been the leader of a turbulent, Jegislative
assembly. Nobody could have browbeaten her, none irri-
tated her nerves, exhausted her patience, or over-reached
her astuteness. In her own single person she could have
comprised the duties of a first minister and a superintendent
of police. Wise, firm, faithless ; secret, crafty, passion-
less ; watchful and inscrutable ; acute and insensate
— withal, perfectly decorous — what more could be
desired ? "

This woman it was wiio, as midsummer
approaclied, proved her appreciation of the
sterling qualities of the drole English girls
by offering to dismiss her English teacher
and give his place to Charlotte Bronte, and
to engage Emily as a pupil-teacher to assist
a music-master. Intense application and
the iron will that caused M. Heger to rage
himself black in the face when opposed to
his, had made Emily a brilliant pianist, with
a thorough comprehension of the science
of music as far as her studies had led her.

"The proposal is kind," writes Charlotte, "and im-
plies a degree of interest which demands gratitude in
turn. 1 don't deny 1 sometimes wish to be in England,
or that I have brief attacks of homesickness, but on the
whole, 1 have borne a very valiant heart thus far, and 1
have been happy in Brussels because I have been fully

144 Charlotte Bronte at Home

occupied with the employments that I lil<e. Emily is
making rapid progress in French, German, music, and
drawing. IWonsieur and iWadame Heger begin to recog-
nise the valuable ]3arts of her character, under her
singularities."

The proposal was accepted, and, instead
of returning to England for the two months'
vacation, the Brontes spent it in the almost
deserted Pensionnat, hard at work. The
only relief from the continuous strain was
in the attendance at the school during the
holidays, of four or five English girls, be-
longing to a family that had lately removed
to Brussels. From one of these Mrs. Gas-
kell had a resume that seems dreary to us
of the routine duties incumbent upon the
sisters in vacation and in the term suc-
ceeding it.

Their one hour of recreation on week-
days was spent in the garden. They
walked in the trellised berceau, or in the
allee defendue, a sequestered alley forbid-
den to the pupils because bounded on one
side by the wall of the Athenee, a boys'
college. The narrator notes that the pair
rarely exchanged a word during these
promenades. If met and addressed directly,
Charlotte replied, always courteously and

Life in the Pensionnat 145

in a soft, even voice, Emily standing by,
impassive and mute. We do not wonder
as we read, in close juxtaposition to tiiis
resume, Mary Taylor's repetition of a re-
mark made by Charlotte in one of her visits
to the Chateau de Koekelberg :

" She seemed to think that most human
beings were destined, by the pressure of
worldly interests, to lose one faculty and
feeling after another, till they went dead
altogether. ' I hope 1 shall be put into my
grave as soon as 1 'm dead. I don't want
to walk about so ! ' "

Martha Taylor ("Jessie Yorke " ) died in
October, 1842, after a short illness. Char-
lotte heard of her danger some hours before
her death, and hastened to offer help and
sympathy to Mary. When she reached
the Chateau it was to hear that the arch,
engaging pet of Taylor and Bronte house-
holds had died in the night.

"I have seen Martha's grave," wrote
Charlotte, mournfully, — "the place where
her ashes lie in a foreign country."

The simple phrase is more pathetic than
the much-quoted description in Shirley of
Jessie's last resting-place.

Close upon this grief came news of Miss

146 Charlotte Bronte at Home

Branwell's serious illness. Her nieces made
haste to pack their trunks and engage
places in the diligence for a hurried journey
homeward. They were in the act of set-
ting out when a second letter brought word
that their aunt had died, October 29, 1842.

CHAPTER XI

MISS BRANWELL'S will — SOME OF BRANWELL'S
FAILURES — charlotte's SECOND YEAR IN
BRUSSELS — MONSIEUR HEGER AND CHAR-
LOTTE BRONTE

WHILE living, Miss Elizabeth Branwell
had never been what the Italians
call siinpatica with any of her nieces.
Anne, gentle and amiable, was decidedly
her favourite of the three. Her will proved
her to be both just and generous. All her
personal effects were to be divided equally
by Charlotte, Emily, and Anne, with the
exception of a "japan dressing-case"
which was to be given to Branwell. After
her just debts and the expenses of a " mod-
erate and decent " funeral were paid, the
residue of her estate was to be invested in
"good landed security," or deposited "in
some safe bank," thereto accumulate for
'47

148 Charlotte Bronte at Home

the benefit of her four nieces, the Bronte
girls and her namesake, Elizabeth Kings-
ton, in Penzance, until the youngest
legatee should attain the age of one-and-
. twenty. Then they were to share and
share alike.

1 have already cited, in evidence of the
cordial relations existing between herself
and her brother-in-law, the fact that IVlr.
Bronte was named first among her ex-
ecutors.

The will was written in 1833, nine years
before her decease, when Branwell — her
pet and pride — was in high favour. Mr.
Shorter accounts for the small legacy left
to him by remarking, "The old lady
doubtless thought that the boy would be
able to take good care of himself."

As he assuredly should have been by
now. His first essay in this direction was
in the capacity of usher in a school. There,
his sensitive vanity upon the subject of his
diminutive stature and red hair made him
a butt for boys who were quick to discover
his weak point and merciless in playing
upon it. He had always been considered
handsome and captivating. When the lads
ridiculed his fiery locks, and stood on tip-

Some of Branwell's Failures 149

toe as he passed, to suggest the expediency
of larger growth in a master who assumed
to manage them — he sulked, threw up the
position, and went home.

His next regular situation was that of
tutor in a private gentleman's house, where,
according to his own story, dashed off in
a flashy letter to a friend, his role was that
of a masculine Tartuffe, " dressed in black,
and smiling like a saint, or martyr." He
posed as a teetotaller, "a most sober, ab-
stemious, patient, mild-hearted, virtuous,
gentlemanly philosopher, the picture of
good works, the treasure-house of righteous
thought." In this character, he tells of
" drinking tea and talking slander with old
ladies," while "fair-faced, blue-eyed, dark-
haired sweet eighteen " sits admiringly
beside him.

"She little thinks the Devil is so near
her ! " subjoins the would-be man-of-pleas-
ure, complacently. The letter from which
the choice excerpt is made winds up, smirk-
ingly, with — "1 must talk to some one
prettier, so good night, dear boy ! "

His ambition to win laurels as a Love-
lace was patent before his flame-coloured
beard sprouted, and led to serious conse-

150 Charlotte Bronte at Home

quences to other and better people than
himself, in after-days.

Portrait-painting — and such portraits ! —
kept him in pocket- and drink-money for
a while. His father partly coerced, partly
persuaded him to accept the position which
Charlotte, in sheer delight at the prospect
of seeing him "steadied down," had de-
scribed in such vivacious terms to Ellen
Nussey — namely, a clerkship on the Leeds
and Manchester Railway.

The location was remote from town or
village, the salary was small, and the duties
were light. The genius had abundant leisure
for the cultivation of literary and artistic
tastes. Instead of availing himself of it,
he sought the acquaintance of neighbour-
ing farmers and manufacturers, partaking
of the rude abundance of their tables and,
as the shining light in their coarser de-
bauches, ' ' drinking himself violent, when
he did not drink himself maudlin."

It goes without saying that he was dis-
missed for neglect and misconduct after
some months of this wretched sort of work.

From Haworth he wrote that his

" recovery from almost insanity was retarded by having
nothing to listen to except the wind, moaning among

Some of Branwell's Failures 151

old chimneys and older ash-trees, — nothing to look at
except heathery hills, walked over when life had all to
hope for, and nothing to regret with me,— ^ho one to
speak to except crabbed old Greeks and Romans who
have been dust the last five thousand years."

He was still at home and still idle when his
aunt died, and, during her illness, Mr.
Weightman, the curate whose name ap-
pears often in Charlotte's and Ellen Nus-
sey's correspondence. "One of my dearest
friends," Branwell styles him in a letter to
Mr. Grundy, author of Pictures of the Past.
And of his aunt he adds, — "I have now
lost the guide and director of all the happy
days connected with my childhood."

How fond and firm was his sisters' faith
in their only brother is proved, incidentally,
by lively messages exchanged, through
Charlotte's letters, between him and Ellen
a month and more after Miss Branwell's
death.

' ' Branwell wants to know why you carefully exclude
all mention of him when you particularly send your re-
gards to every other member of the family. He desires
to know whether, or in what, he has offended you, or
whether it is considered improper for a young lady to
mention the gentlemen of the house."

Charlotte writes this sportively after Ellen's

IS2 Charlotte Bronte at Home

return to Brookroyd from a visit slie paid
to Hawgrtii in January, 1843.

In this blindness of devotion is to be
found the key to the puzzle of the admira-
tion of his talents and accomplishments felt
for him by the more richly endowed mem-
bers of his family — admiration of which
their minds were never .disabused.

Miss Robinson hits off his peculiar charm
aptly when she says :

" He had a spell for those who heard him speak.
There was no subject, moral, intellectual, or philosophic,
too remote or too profound for him to measure it at a
moment's notice, with the ever-ready fallacious plumb-
line of his brilliant vanity. He would talk for hours ; be
eloquent, convincing, almost noble ; and afterw.ird
accompany his audience to the nearest public-house."

Charlotte left him in the Parsonage when
she returned alone to Brussels late in Janu-
ary. The four had had a serenely happy
vacation together ; walking on the moors
when the weather warranted outdoor ex-
cursions ; reading together in the evenings ;
exchanging experiences in earnest, or in
merry vein. We see them at those Christ-
mas holidays, for the last time, an appar-
ently united and happy household, hopeful
for one another, and sanguine in plans for

Second Year in Brussels 153

the home-school to be organised at Haworth
when the ' ' one year more at the most " — in
which M. Hegerhad predicted that the work
of preparation for their chosen profession
"would be completed and completed well "
— had expired.

Then — Charlotte would return from Brus-
sels, bringing diploma and other credentials
with her that would ensure a clientele for
the seminary ; then — Anne would resign
her odious governess-ship ; then — Emily
would be such a music-mistress as York-
shire had never seen. Perhaps — for fancy
grew audacious in building air-castles — the
proprieties would not debar Branwell from
teaching drawing and painting in a Young
Ladies' School conducted by his sisters in
his father's house.

The old stone Parsonage would be en-
larged with the aunt's legacy, to receive
and lodge boarding pupils comfortably, and
a few day-scholars might be drawn from the
neighbouring farmsteads and the country-
houses of mill-owners.

This was the dream nursed by Charlotte
in her lonely journey back to Belgium ; by
gentle, homesick Anne in turning her face
toward a new situation ; by Emily, joyfully

154 Charlotte Bronte at Home

marking out the home-life to be led under
the ancient roof-tree by her father, Bran-
well, and herself, and devising a thousand
schemes to unite f rugahty and dainty variety
in her bills-of-fare. Of the three sisters,
the boy loved Emily best, and she had
most patience with him, — believed that she
understood him best of all his kindred.
Charlotte had no misgivings for the happi-
ness of either in the first months of her
second exile. She could have selected no
better guardian for the wayward, brilliant
brother than Emily ; no more congenial
companion for the eccentric sister than
Branwell.

Like most sequels to successful works of
whatever kind, Charlotte Bronte's second
year in Brussels was a mistake. She was
no longer a learner only, but a teacher as
well. How repugnant was the task in the
circumstances that closed about her upon
her return, the reader of The Professor and
Villette may imagine. Emily's absence was
a fretting sorrow that made her isolation in
the bustling world about her harder to
bear.

" M. and Madame Heger are the only two persons in
the house for whom 1 really experience regard and es-

Second Year in Brussels 155

teem, and of course I cannot be always with them, nor
even very often," she writes to Ellen ; and again, —
" There is a constant sense of solitude in the midst of
numbers. The Protestant, the foreigner, is a solitary
being, whether as teacher or pupil."

In the same epistle occurs a warm denial
of a rumour which had reached her that "the
future epoux of Mademoiselle Bronte is on
the Continent."

" If these charitable people knew the total seclusion
of the life I lead, — that I never exchange ^ word with
any other man than M. Heger, and seldom, indeed, with
him, — they would, perhaps, cease to suppose any such
chimerical and groundless notion had influenced my
proceedings."

She laboured assiduously upon the studies
that were to qualify her for the principal-
ship of the home-school — now the sum of
her ambitions. In teaching she was as
conscientious as in studying. The term
was long — from the first of February to the
middle of August ; her fellow-teachers
were uncongenial ; her pupils respected,
without troubling themselves to love, the
alien by birth and faith ; Martha Taylor was
dead, Mary Taylor was in New Zealand ; the
two English families that had opened their
houses to her on holidays and Sundays

156 Charlotte Bronte at Home

were no longer resident in Brussels, and
Madame Heger had conceived a dislike of
the outspoken Protestant sub-teacher who
scorned to play the spy and regarded the
eavesdropper and the pryer into private
letters as no better than a thief. What un-
recorded passages at arms these two may
have had can be guessed at from reading
Villette and The Professor, and the bio-
graphies of Charlotte Bronte. While she
was an inmate of the Hegers' house Char-
lotte was honourably reserved as to these
encounters.

She is more communicative on this point,
as upon others, to Ellen Nussey than to any
one else, and the nearest approach to open
complaint of her superior that ever crept
into her letters to Ellen is discreet, while
frank.

The dreary summer vacation passed by
her in "the great, deserted Pensionnat,
with only one teacher for a companion,"
and that one a woman without breeding or
character, — "a cold, systematic sensualist,"
— was over. The long, solitary walks, the
visits paid, in utter loneliness of heart, to
Martha's grave in the foreign cemetery, the
footsore wanderings through boulevards

Second Year in Brussels isy

and alleys into the fields beyond the city
limits, with no prospect except other fields,
thinly dotted with trees and outlined by
prim hedges, the wakeful nights, and silent,
appetiteless meals — were exchanged for the
welcome round of prescribed duties. Upon
one of the many fete-days that relieved the
monotony of work for the other teachers,
she wrote to Ellen :

"You, living in the country, can iiardly believe it is
possible life can be so monotonous in the centre of a
brilliant capital like Brussels, but so it is. I feel it most
on holidays, when all the girls and teachers go out to
visit, and it sometimes happens that I am left, during
several hours, quite alone, with four great desolate
schoolrooms at my disposition. I try to read, I try to
write, but in vain. I then wander from room to room,
but the silence and loneliness of all the house weigh
down one's spirits like lead.

" You .will hardly believe that Madame Heger (good,
kind as 1 have described her) never comes near me on
these occasions. I own 1 was astonished the first time
I was left alone thus ; when everybody was enjoying
the pleasures of a fete-day with their friends, and she
knew 1 was quite by myself, and never took the least
notice of me. Yet, 1 understand she praises me very
much to everybody, and says what excellent lessons 1
give. She is not colder to me than she is to the other
teachers, but they are less dependent, on her than I am.
They have relations and acquaintances in Brussels.

" You remember the letter she wrote me when 1 was

158 Charlotte Bronte at Home

in England ? How kind and affectionate that was ! Is
it not odd ?

" In the meantinne, the complaints 1 make at present
are a sort of relief which 1 permit myself. In all other
respects I am well satisfied with my position, and you
may say so to people who inquire after me (if any one
does). Write to me, dear, whenever you can. You do
a good deal when you send me a letter, for you comfort
a very desolate heart."

It has seemed good, in the temporal un-
fitness of things, unto certain biographical
essayists and sensational penny-a-liners, to
deduce, from what Mrs. Gaskell deplores
as the "silent estrangement between Ma-
dame Heger and Miss Bronte in the second
year of her residence in Brussels," the
romantic and unsavoury conclusion of a
hopeless passion on the part of the English
teacher for one of her employers. This
conclusion — bolstered by forced and dishon-
ouring interpretations of passages such as 1
have just quoted, bearing upon Charlotte's
unhappiness in her isolation, her impatience
under the limitations of strangerhood and
religious prejudices — has been formulated
into a theory and dissected, ad nauseam, by
critics and scandal-lovers on both sides of
the Atlantic. 1 cannot sufficiently commend
the dignified brevity of Mr. Shorter's me-

Monsieur Heger i^q

thod of disposing of a discussion thiat should
never hiave been opened.

" Madame Heger and her family, it must be admitted,
have kept this impression afloat. Madame Heger re-
fused to see Mrs. Gaskell when she called upon her in
the Rue d'lsabelle ; and her daughters will tell you that
their father broke off his correspondence with Miss
Bronte because his favourite English pupil showed an
undue extravagance of devotion.

" Now to all this 1 do not hesitate to give an emphatic
contradiction, a contradiction based upon the only
independent authority available."

After recapitulating the testimony of
Charlotte's surviving schoolfellows — Miss
Laetitia Wheelwright and her sisters — in
support of his refutation of the slander, he
proceeds :

" Madame Heger did, indeed, hate Charlotte Bronte
in her later years. This is not unnatural when we re-
member how that unfortunate woman has been gibbeted
for all time in the characters of Mile. Zoraide Reuter and
Madame Beck. But, in justice to the creator of these
scathing portraits, it may be mentioned that Charlotte
Bronte took every precaution to prevent VilUtte from
obtaining currency in the city which inspired it. .
She had received a promise that there should be no
translation, and that the book would never appear in
the French language. . Immediately after her

death the novel appeared in the only tongue understood
by Madame Heger."*

* Shorter's Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle, page 109.

i6o Charlotte Bronte at Home

To this may be joined the possibility
that the original of M. Paul Emmanuel, be-
ing an inordinately vain man, even for a
Franco-Belgian, was not averse to the re-
putation of having inspired his most dis-
tinguished eleve with an unconquerable
adoration of himself. He corresponded
with her after she left school, and she drew
much intellectual gratification from his let-
ters, vivacious, stimulating, and sparkhng
with the caustic wit that made him to be
both admired and dreaded in professional
and in private life. Charlotte's answers
were brilliant essays that might have been
read aloud by the Brussels town-crier, yet
Madame disapproved so strongly of the
association that he instructed Charlotte to
address him, for the future, at the Royal
Athenee, where he was a professor. The
caution was ill-advised; it may have been
over-crafty. In the true spirit of a gal-
lant intrigant, he may have devised this
manoeuvre for feeling his way to a fuller
understanding with his correspondent, and
as a test of her real sentiments to him. If
she obeyed the injunction, he was sure of
his standing in her affections. The con-
quest was not important, but it counted

Monsieur Heger i6i

for one more upon his list, and it was
a novel pleasure to win the first place in
the well-kept heart of a demure "Eng-
lish Mees, " whose genius he recognised.
Aware of his wife's dislike of her late sub-
ordinate, and that Charlotte was not ig-
norant of it, he, as a man of the world,
comprehended just what concealment of
the exchange of letters from the lynx-eyed
snrveillante signified, and what was implied
by mutual confession of the expediency of
secrecy. Whatever motive prompted the
request, the subtle diplomat was foiled by
the single-minded integrity of the country
girl.

After Jane Eyre had made her famous,
she was asked by Miss Wheelwright if she
still corresponded with M. Heger. In reply
Charlotte stated the simple fact 1 have al-
luded to. M. Heger had told her that his
wife disapproved of his writmg to, or re-
ceiving letters from, her, and directed her
how to evade her surveillance.

"1 stopped writing at once," said Char-
lotte, in the frank sincerity of innocence.
" 1 would not have dreamed of writing to
him when 1 found it was disagreeable to
his wife" — and with calm emphasis, —

1 62 Charlotte Bronte at Home

"Certainly I would not write unknown to
her."

Mr. Shorter's dispassionate conclusion of
the whole matter is cordially seconded by
all who have had the patience to sift the
slander thoroughly, and the candour to re-
pudiate indignantly the tardy attempt to
cast a shadow upon the character of a great
and a pure woman:

"Let, then, this silly and offensive im-
putation be now and forever dismissed from
the minds of Charlotte Bronte's admirers, if
indeed it had ever lodged there."

CHAPTER XII

SCHEME OF HOME-SCHOOL ABANDONED — BRAN-
WELL'S RETURN HOME — HIS "SHAMEFUL
STORY " AND DOWNWARD COURSE

ON December 19, 1843, Charlotte Bronte
wrote to her sister Emily from
Brussels :

" I have taken my determination. I tiope to be at
home the day after New Year's Day. I have told
Madame Heger. But in order to come home 1 shall be
obliged to draw on my cash for another £s. 1 have
only £■) at present, and as there are several little things
1 should like to buy before I leave Brussels — which, you
know, cannot be got as well in England — £} would not
suffice. Low spirits have afflicted me much lately, but
I hope all will be well when I get home — above all, if I
find papa and you and B. and A. well. I am not ill in
body. It is only the mind which is a trifle shaken — for
want of comfort.

" 1 shall try to cheer up now. — Good-bye.

"C. B."

The "if 1 find" had sad significance.
163

1 64 Charlotte Bronte at Home

Her sisters had tried to iiide from her the
knowledge of disasters that were creeping
with fatal certainty toward the home that
had seemed tranquil and safe a year ago.
One of the strongest links in the chain of
circumstantial evidence forged by the pur-
veyors of the malodorous scandal treated of
in the last chapter is a sentence in one of
Charlotte's letters to Miss Nussey of a date
subsequent by several years to her depart-
ure from Brussels :

" 1 returned to Brussels after aunt's death,
against my conscience, prompted by what
then seemed an irresistible impulse. 1 was
punished for my selfish folly by a total
withdrawal, for more than two years, of
happiness and peace of mind."

The explanation of the remark is as sim-
ple as her own uprightness. We have seen
how she took upon her young shoulders
the elder-sisterly duties laid down at the
grave's mouth by Maria, and that the re-
sponsibility had never been demitted by
her scrupulous conscience. At the death
of the aunt who had been the nominal mis-
tress of the house and the guardian of the
motherless children, it was borne in strongly
upon Charlotte's mind that she ought to

Bad News from Home 165

forego her dreams of the completed equip-
ment recommended by M. Heger as essen-
tial to her success as an instructress, together
with her desire to learn German for the
sake of the rich literature of that language,
and to perfect herself in French and feed
her ardent mind with the strong meat it
craved. Her place was, she felt, at home.
When Emily persisted in her refusal to re-
turn to Brussels, asserting her right to
remain in the Haworth out of which she
was miserable and never well, Charlotte
yielded with secret satisfaction for which a
conscience, sensitive to morbidness, up-
braided her afterward.

For things had gone badly in the Parson-
age in her absence. The reason assigned
to Madame Heger for what seemed an
abrupt resolution to return to England was
Mr. Bronte's impending blindness. A cat-
aract was forming upon each eye, and
months of darkness and depression must
elapse before an operation could be at-
tempted.

This was true as far as it went, but it
did not go nearly all the gloomy way.
Emily was intensely uneasy at the in-
fluence exerted over her father by Mr.

i66 Charlotte Bronte at Home

Weightman's successor. The new curate,
a rollicking Irishman, richly deserved the
castigation he received in Shirley us "Peter
Augustus Malone." If the whole truth
were known, it would be evident, I think,
that Mr. Bronte had troubles of his own at
this time. He may not have been fond of
his sister-in-law when she was alive, but
she belonged to his generation, and her
years of faithful service in his household
gave her a hold upon his heart as upon his
gratitude. He missed her sadly, — and
Emily was a poor substitute for the woman
who had seen in him the true head of the
house, the master whose comfort and
wishes were to be consulted above every-
thing else in the conduct of affairs. Emily
was an excellent housekeeper, and, intel-
lectually, a more congenial companion for
her scholarly parent than Miss Branwell.
The fact remains that, when Anne had gone
back to her post as governess to the daugh-
ters of the Reverend Mr. Robinson at Thorp
Green, and Branwell had accompanied her
as tutor to Mr. Robinson's boys, the Vicar
of Haworth was lonely and low in spirits.
The curate, with his devil-may-care rattle,
diverted his thoughts, and the curate's

REV. PATRICK BRONTE

Bad News from Home 167

Irish whiskey raised the tone of his nerves.
Parson and assistant drank together until
the parish whispered ominously of what
might be the end of their carousals, and
Emily, goaded to desperation by anxiety,
took Charlotte into her confidence. Proud,
and apparently self-reliant to the rest of the
world, she always leaned in spirit upon the
elder sister, as upon her arm in their taci-
turn promenades in the garden behind the
Pensionnat in the Rue d'lsabelle.

The shock of the news to Charlotte is
inadequately described in her remark to
Emily that she is "a trifle shaken." The
instant pang of self-reproach in the thought
that she might have averted the disaster
had she stayed at home, left pain that was
slow in departing. The effort to restore
her father to his former feelings and habits ;
sorrow at his downfall ; the mortification
and the nervous strain consequent upon the
trial, may well have "robbed her of peace
of mind " even before misgivings as to
Branwell's behaviour and fate mingled ele-
ments of more active bitterness in the cup
held to her patient lips.

"I think," she wrote to Ellen Nussey,
three weeks after her arrival in England,

168 Charlotte Bronte at Home

"however long 1 may live, 1 shall never
forget what the parting with M. Heger cost
me. It grieved me so much to grieve him
who has been so true, kind, and disinter-
ested a friend."

He had disapproved so strongly of her
resignation of her situation before the cur-
riculum he had indicated was completed,
that they nearly quarrelled. " Haworth
seems such a lonely, quiet spot, buried
away from the world," is a sentence on the
same page. " 1 no longer regard myself as
young — indeed I shall soon be twenty-
eight, and it seems as if I ought to be work-
ing and braving the rough realities of the
world as other people do."

The realities were soon to be rough
enough, although not of the kind she had
coveted. While she and Emily sat together
in the parlour, making a set of new shirts
for the absent brother, and while tramping
the moors, — "to the great damage of our
shoes, but, 1 hope, to the benefit of our
health," — brains and tongue were engaged
upon the scheme of the home-school, their
one hope of uniting the family and earn-
ing a livelihood for themselves and their
purblind father.

Home-School Abandoned 169

We will not linger upon the wearisome
waiting of the ensuing year (1844). Circu-
lars were prepared and distributed, private
letters written to everybody who might be
able to forward their plans. The two girls
at home, and Anne at Thorp Green, busied
themselves with the duties that lay nearest
their hands and tried to be patient as the
months wore away without a ray of en-
couragement. Charlotte had resigned all
hope of success before the earliest snow-
drops bloomed in the Parsonage garden.

" Depend upon it," she wrote to a friend
who had interested herself in behalf of the
project, "if you were to persuade a mamma
to bring her child to Haworth, the aspect
of the place would frighten her, and she
would probably take the dear girl back with
her, instanter. We are glad that we have
made the attempt, and we will not be cast
down because it has not succeeded."

Anne and Branwell were at home for the
midsummer holidays. Except that she was
paler and quieter than was her former wont,
Charlotte saw no alteration in the "little
sister." It was a deep delight to pet and
nurse her, as in her baby days, and to have
her as a third in the walks and talks that

170 Charlotte Bronte at Home

were the pleasures of the lonely life in the
old grey house it "would have been folly
to alter while there was so little likelihood
of ever getting pupils." Anne was always
satisfactory except as to bodily strength.
She rallied, as usual, in the bracing air of
the uplands and the atmosphere of home.

Branwell was a disappointment to the
whole family and a mystery. Heretofore,
the spoiled son of the house had been af-
fectionate and gay-humoured, willing to
please others when doing so did not in-
commode himself, lively in talk, and, as
the sisters thought, fascinating in manner.
He was now moody and recklessly merry
by turns, cross without reason, now boast-
ing of successes he had won, anon berating
himself as an ignominious failure, and de-
claring that he was the victim of remorse,
pursued by the furies. Such wild gas-
conades had never before been heard in the
decent dwelling. It was a positive relief to
those left behind when he cut short his
holiday and hurried back to Thorp Green
and work.

At the New Year of 1845 he was again
with the puzzled father and sisters. Ap-
parently he was doing better than ever be-

Home-School Abandoned 171

fore, holding his tutorship and giving
satisfaction to his employers. "He is
quieter and less irritable on the whole than
he was in summer," is Charlotte's record
of the holiday visit. "Anne is, as usual,
always good, mild, and patient."

The school project was dead and buried.
Not one pupil had applied for admission in
response to circulars and private letters.
The excitement of preparation and expect-
ation, the alternations of hope and dis-
couragement, the talks of how this room
could be cut in two, how a vAng could be
thrown out from the gable nearest the road,
windows enlarged, and others opened — all
this was now as dream-like as the busy
life at Brussels. Life was a stagnant pool
on which mossy scum gathered with the
slow passage of time.

In JVlarch Charlotte tells Ellen Nussey :

" I can hardly tell you how time gets on at Haworth.
There is no event whatever lo mark its progress. One
day resembles another, and all have heavy, lifeless physi-
ognomies. Sunday, baking-day, and Saturday are the
only ones that have any distinctive mark. Meantime,
life wears away. 1 shall soon be thirty ; and 1 have
done nothing yet. Sometimes I get melancholy at the
prospect before and behind me. Yet it is wrong and
foolish to repine. Undoubtedly, my duty directs me to

172 Charlotte Bronte at Home

stay at home for the present. There was a time when
Haworth was a very pleasant place to me. It is not so
now. 1 feel as if we were all buried here. 1 long to
travel, to work, to live a life of action."

The dead level was moved from beneath
by a new dread. In reading to her almost
blind father the reader's own eyes failed
her. She fancied that the calamity which
had befallen him was about to overtake her.
Loss of sight would be a supreme sorrow.
In a letter to M. Heger, she confides am-
bitions of which she had already spoken to
Emily and Anne. The ardent mind was
tearing away the swaddling-bands of con-
ventionality and diffidence of her native
powers. In every pulse and nerve it was
quickening and fighting its way toward the
air. Formerly she had passed days, weeks
—entire months — in writing, she confesses,
and not without hope of achieving some-
thing worthy in time:

' ' But at present my eyesight is too weak. If I were
to write much 1 should become blind. This weakness
of sight is to me a terrible privation. But for that, do
you know what I would do, iVlonsieur ? I should write
a book and dedicate it to my master of literature, the
only master that I have ever had — to you, Monsieur !
1 have often told you in French how much I respect you,
how much I am indebted to your goodness, to your

Bran well's Return Home 173

counsels, I could wish to say it once in English. This
cannot be. It is not to be thought of. A literary
career is closed to me."

How far she was from feeling the resign-
ation she here professes to have attained
crops out in other letters.

' ' Write again soon, for 1 feel rather fierce,
and want stroking down," is the winding
up of one.

Her anxiety on her father's account in-
creased daily.

"His sight diminishes weekly. . . .
He fears that he will be nothing in his par-
ish. I try to cheer him. Sometimes I suc-
ceed temporarily, but no consolation can
restore his sight, or atone for the want of
it. Still, he is never peevish, never impa-
tient — only anxious and dejected."

Like the bursting of a wind-storm over
the rufifled pool was the spectacle that
awaited her upon her return from the only
visit she allowed herself to make in the sad,
tedious summer of 1845. Taking advantage
of Anne's arrival at Haworth for the mid-
summer vacation, Charlotte accepted Ellen
Nussey's reiterated invitation to pass a few
days with her at Brookroyd. While she
was enjoying this breathing spell, Branwell

174 Charlotte Bronte at Home

made an unexpected appearance in his
father's house. Within twenty-four hours
afterwards he had a violent attack of illness,
the effect of a recent debauch.

On the very day of Charlotte's return he
received by mail from Mr. Robinson a stern
dismissal from his tutorship, coupled with
a command never to show his face again
at Thorp Green.

A terrible scene ensued, upon the par-
ticulars of which I have no disposition to
dwell. Branwell's story — told a hundred
times to whomsoever would hearken to his
drivellings, and with variations that should
have discounted the authenticity of it — was
that Mrs. Robinson, her husband's junior
by a score of years, had (to quote from his
narrative to his friend and biographer, Mr.
Francis Grundy) "showed him a degree
of kindness which, when he " (Branwell)
"was deeply grieved one day at her hus-
band's conduct, ripened into declarations of
more than ordinary feeling.

"Although she is seventeen years my
senior, all combined to an attachment on
my part, and led to reciprocations which 1
had little looked for, " is a phrase that brands
the writer as a cad and a puppy, who

Branwell's " Shameful Story " 175

would not scruple to sacrifice a woman's
reputation to liis vanity. The conviction
is deepened by tiie mention in the same
recital — or romance — of "the probability
of her becoming free to give me herself and
her estate."

Mrs. Gaskell believed Branwell's version
of the catastrophe, which, he declared to
his unhappy death-day, had wrecked his
prospects, his ambitions, and his heart.
Legal investigation into the shameful story
after the publication of the Gaskell biogra-
phy of Charlotte Bronte proved beyond
any reasonable doubt that the intrigue was
largely the figment of a brain disordered by
drink and opium.

It is within the bounds of probability
that Mrs. Robinson may have amused some
idle hours by conversation with the versatile
tutor who talked so well, and evidently
admired her mature beauty. That the af-
fair, which she never thought of as such,
ever progressed beyond the initial stage of
a pretty woman's enjoyment of a bright
young fellow's appreciation of her personal
charms, is the most meagre of possibilities.

However fallacious the hopes based upon
this good-natured toleration of his devoirs,

1 76 Charlotte Bronte at Home

and however mendacious the tales that
outraged the moral perceptions of his rela-
tives, not one of them doubted the sub-
stance of the narrative. Mrs. Gaskell had
it, with such loathsome details as a virtuous
girl, brought up amid puritanical surround-
ings, could bring herself to repeat. Father
and sisters lived and died in the full belief
that a false wife and depraved mother was
accountable for their darling's ruin. He
was so seldom sober after this that he may
have wrought his own imagination up (or
down) to the pitch of believing his own
story.

Ellen Nussey was the one person with-
out the house of mourning who was cog-
nisant of the true state of affairs. She was
in feeling, and almost in fact, a daughter of
the home so darkly overcast by the mis-
conduct of him who had been almost a
brother to her in happier days. To her
Charlotte unburdened her heart when the
load was insupportable.

On June 17, 1846, we have this record:

"We, I am sorry to say, have been somewhat more
harassed than usual lately. The death of Mr. Robinson,
which took place about three weeks, or a month ago,
served Branwell for a pretext to throw all about him

Bran well's " Shameful Story " 177

into hubbub and confusion with his emotions, etc.
Shortly after came news from all hands that Mr. Robin-
son had altered his will before he died, and effectually
prevented all chance of a marriage between his widow
and Branwell ; that she should not have a shilling if she
ever ventured to re-open any communication with him.
Of course, he then became intolerable. To Papa, he
allows rest neither day nor night, and he is continually
screwing money out of him, sometimes threatening that
he will kill himself if it is withheld from him.

' ' He says Mrs. Robinson is now insane, that her
mind is a complete wreck owing to remorse for her con-
duct towards Mr. Robinson (whose end, it appears, was
hastened by distress of mind) and grief for having lost
him " (Branwell). " I do not know how much to believe
of what he says, but I fear she is very ill."*

In the first edition of Mrs. Gasitell's Life
of Charlotte Bronte she relates an inci-
dent connected with "the news from all
hands," referred to by Charlotte, and which
is to this day current gossip in Haworth.
The story, in brief, is to the effect that the
widow of Mr. Robinson sent a special mes-
senger to inform Branwell of the prohibitory
codicil to her husband's will ; that, when a
summons to meet her envoy at the Black
Bull reached the infatuated youth, he
dressed himself in his best suit, and "fairly

* Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle, page i Jb.

178 Charlotte Bronte at Home

danced down the churchyard," to keep the
appointment. The bearer of Mrs. Robin-
son's message was closeted with her lover
in the "brown parlour " for half an hour
or so, then came out, mounted his horse,
and went his way.

Much later in the day, some one passing
the closed door of the parlour heard strange,
stertorous breathing, and entering, saw
Branwell Bronte lying on the floor "in a
sort of fit."

It would seem certain that a man from
Thorp Green had an interview with the
late tutor, and brought him unwelcome
news. When we learn from Mr. Shorter's
narrative, that no such clause as was re-
ported by Branwell was attached to Mr.
Robinson's will, which "put no restraint
whatever upon the actions of Mrs. Robin-
son," furthermore, that Mrs. Gaskell's law-
yer was "fain to confess that his client
advanced certain statements on insufficient
testimony " — we are driven back upon the
persuasion, already expressed, that the
ugly tale owed framework, as well as
colour, to the diseased imagination of a
drunkard and an opium-eater. Something
of his damaging talk had doubtless reached

Branwells " Shameful Story " lyq

Mrs. Robinson. Or he may have written
to her after her husband's death. In either
case, she acted with firmness and propriety
in notifying him that there must be no
more folly of that kind, and forbidding him
to hold any further communication with her.
A verbal message was safer than a letter,
when she had to deal with such a suitor.

His family and the neighbourhood had
nothing but his word for what passed in
the "brown parlour." Charlotte, at least,
was not in full sympathy with him when
she wrote in June, "I do not know how
much to believe."

Miss Mary F. Robinson, Emily's biogra-
pher, blames Charlotte for her stern repro-
bation of her fallen brother. When she
said to Ellen Nussey that she "could not,
and would not, invite her to Haworth while
Branwell was at home," that, since she
could not say one word, truthfully, in ex-
tenuation of his conduct, she would "hold
her tongue," she signified that she had
cast him out of her heart. His erotic rav-
ings were disgusting ribaldry to her ap-
prehension ; his presence — red-eyed, with
bloated sacs above the cheek-bones, and
pendulous jaw — was offensive to every in-

i8o Charlotte Bronte at Home

stinct of a pure and modest nature. The
father might sleep in the room with him
to prevent him from blowing out his mad-
dened brains, and Emily sit up into the
small hours to "let in the prodigal and lead
him in safety to his rest. " Charlotte and
Anne would be partaker in no man's sins,
whatever might be the bond of blood and
association. " Anne could only shudder at
his sin, and Charlotte was too indignant
for pity."

He pitied himself too extravagantly to
awaken generous compassion in a stronger
nature.

A biographer relates, in illustration of this
solace and salve of a weak, diseased con-
science, an anecdote of the sister's behaviour
to the Castaway, as he loved to call himself.
He brought word to her one day that one
of the Sunday-school girls was ill and that
he had visited her and read a chapter in the
Bible and a hymn to her at her request.
Charlotte turned upon him a look of won-
dering incredulity that " wounded him
as if some one had struck him a blow in
the mouth."

Then, seeming to "accuse herself of
having wronged me, she smiled kindly

^t^

^'

BRANWELL BRONTE

FROM A DRAWING BV MISS E. TAYLOR

The Unrepentant Prodigal i8i

upon me and said, ' She is my little scholar
and I will go and see her.'

" I replied not a word. I was too much
cut up. When she was gone, I came over
here to the ' Black Bull,' and made a night
of it in sheer disgust and desperation. Why
could they not give me some credit when 1
was trying to be good ? "

Comment is superfluous. Like other
morally infirm people, he cringed and
whined at the lightest lash of retributive
justice. He would have the prodigal's
welcome-feast served ungrudgingly to him
while still in the foreign land and before he
had felt the gnawings of hunger, much less
the pangs of contrition.

He did not need scenes like these to drive
him to the Black Bull. Every penny he
could beg or borrow he spent there, and in
the surreptitious purchase of opium, resort-
ing to the meanest subterfuges to obtain
the deadly drug. More than one attack of
delirium tremens made a hell of the cham-
ber he shared with the brave old blind man.
The brooding quiet of the daintily kept
homestead was broken by maniacal yells
and drunken oaths. The Parson's son and
the pride of the village was a common sot

1 82 Charlotte Bronte at Home

and hopeless blackguard, and all Yorkshire
knew it.

Well might Charlotte write, on the last
day of the black and bitter Old Year 1845,
to Ellen, who had told her of a similar
affliction in another family:

"You say well that no sufferings are so

awful as those brought on by dissipation.

It seems grievous indeed that

those who have not sinned should suffer

so largely."

CHAPTER XIII

STILL-BORN VOLUME OF VERSE — "THE PRO-
FESSOR " REJECTED — OPERATION UPON MR.

BRONTE'S EYES GREAT SUCCESS OF "JANE

EYRE " — HURRIED TRIP TO LONDON

A LITTLE volume of poems— " a thinner
one than was calculated upon," re-
marked Charlotte in surprised disappoint-
ment — was put together by the three sisters
in 1845, and timidly offered to a publisher.

By accident, Charlotte had discovered
some manuscripts of Emily's which she
thought "condensed and terse, vigorous
and genuine."

"To my ear," she says, "they had also
a peculiar music, wild, melancholy, and
elevating."

When, by hours of entreaty and argu-
ment, she had "persuaded Emily that
such poems merited publication," Anne

1S3

184 Charlotte Bronte at Home

" quietly produced some of her own com-
positions. . . .

"I tlioughit tiiat these verses, too, had a
sweet, sincere pathos of their own. We
had very early cherished the dream of one
day being authors.

"We agreed to arrange a small selection
of our poems, and, if possible, to get them
printed.

"Averse to personal publicity, we veiled
our own names under those of Currer, Ellis,
and Acton Bell."

When to the simple statements made
above are added others to the effect that the
volume was issued at the authors' risk, an
advance of ^^31, los. having been made
by the sisters before it was printed ; finally,
that it fell so nearly still-born from the
press as to merit the title of an utter failure,
— the poor, brief, pitiful tale is told.

In a letter to Thomas De Quincey, accom-
panying a presentation-copy, Charlotte
says, with jauntiness that is a gallant, if
insufficient, mask for an aching heart :

"The consequences predicted have, of course, over-
taken us. Our book is found to be a drug. No man
needs it, or heeds it. . .

" Before transferring the edition to the trunk-makers,

Still-Born Volume of Verse 185

we have decided on distributing as presents a few copies
of what we cannot sell."

This was the end of the literary venture
that had helped to lift the crushed spirits of
the trio above the wreck of the love, the
hopes, and the ambitions centred in their
hapless brother. While the sisters talked
over the enterprise in their nightly prome-
nade of the humble parlour, and Charlotte
wrote formal, old-maidish letters signed
" C. Bell " to the publishers in London, and
one and all concerted economies and sacri-
fices by which the advance-money could
be raised without depleting the family
finances — the horror in the house grew
more appalling.

"In his present state, it is scarcely possi-
ble to stay in the room where he is. What
the future has in store I do not know,"
says Charlotte in JVlarch, 1846.

The book of verses stole into, and out of,
the literary world in May. In June we hear
that "good situations have been offered to
Branwell, for which, by a fortnight's work,
he could have qualified himself But he
will do nothing except drink and make us
all wretched."

In August the oculists pronounced Mr.

1 86 Charlotte Bronte at Home

Bronte ready to be operated upon for cat-
aract, and Charlotte accompanied him to
Manchester for that purpose. The opera-
tion was completely successful, the power-
ful constitution and courage of the venerable
patient contributing, in no small measure,
to the happy result.

On August 25th, while awaiting the ar-
rival of the surgeon and his instruments,
and doing her brave best to keep up her
father's spirits for the crucial trial, Char-
lotte received a small parcel by post. It
was the MS. of The Professor, a one-vol-
ume novel she had written after sending
out the poems to try their fortunes among
critical publishers. The story was rejected
— without thanks — by the firm to which
she had submitted it.

The poems — of which I always think as
a triple-stemmed lily, springing, straight
and stainless, from the mean soil of such
new and degrading experiences as had
visited the secluded home since the mis-
erable day of the prodigal's unrepentant
return — had died in the hour of their
birth. By a professional verdict. The Tro-
fessor — the first-fruits of the Brussels
life, the harbinger of the unborn Villette

" The Professor " 187

— was doomed to a yet more ignominious
fate.

In the fortniglit that followed the opera-
tion, in the intervals of reading and talking
to her father, as he lay with bandaged
eyes in a darkened room, Charlotte not
only started The Professor again upon his
travels from one publishing-house to an-
other, but sat down to write the opening
chapters oi Jane Eyre. The fructifying bud,
having had a glimpse of day and sunshine,
must and would grow. When once the
story that was to thrill the nations got hold
of her, she knew that she had found her
way into a second and glorious life that
was to be balm and compensation for the
"things that are seen."

The present and temporal demanded all
the fortitude she could summon from every
source. Anne fell ill in the unprecedented
severity of the next winter.

" England might really have taken a slide up into the
Arctic Zone," is Charlotte's mid-December weather re-
port. "The sky looks like ice ; the earth is frozen ;
the wind is as keen as a two-edged blade.
Nothing happens at Haworth ; nothing, at least, of a
pleasant kind. One little incident occurred about a
week ago to sting us to life. . . It was merely

1 88 Charlotte Bronte at Home

the arrival of a sheriff's officer on a visit to Branwell, in-
viting him either to pay his debts, or tal<e a trip to
Yorl<. Of course his debts had to be paid. It is not
agreeable to lose money, time after time, in this way.
But where is the use of dwelling on such subjects ? It
will make him no better."

Mr. Bronte was ill with influenza. Tabby
was over seventy, dim of sight, hard of
hearing, and hard to please, even by the
" children " she idolised. The only water-
supply of the Parsonage was from the well
at the back, beyond which arose a sloping
hillside crowded with graves ; the only
heat within the stone walls and above the
flagged floors came from a starved-looking
grate in each "living-room." The cold of
the draughty halls bit the flesh and stabbed
to the dividing asunder of the joints and
marrow. Anne's asthmatic cough was
fearfully distressing, often preventing her
from lying down at night ; Charlotte suf-
fered excruciatingly from toothache, and
began to look " grey, old, worn, and sunk,"
to herself in the mirror.

We know, now, that the weird and
wonderful story in which she lived during
the few hours she could spare for desk and
pen, nerved her to pull through the cruel

" The Professor " 189

winter. It was one, and a great one, of
the "many, many things she had to be
thankful for," when spring, shivering and
reluctant, crept up the frozen moorlands.
A promised visit from Ellen Nussey was a
wholesome stimulant to Charlotte's spent
forces. This was to have been paid in
May, and after several postponements came
to pass in August.

In August, too, The Professor knocked,
for the sixth time, at a publisher's door.
The author was not surprised to receive, a
few days thereafter, the MS. that had been
submitted to Messrs. Smith & Elder, Corn-
hill. She was pleasurably excited that it
was accompanied by a two-page letter of
candid, friendly criticism from Mr. W. S.
Williams, the professional "reader'' of the
firm. He had taken the pains to examine
the story, and had the sense and taste to
discern the merits of it. It was, in his
opinion, the work of a person of so much
more than mediocre talent that he put him-
self to the further trouble of writing to
" Currer Bell" that, while The Professor
was not available for the present use of the
house, a three-volume novel from the same
pen might be. Jane Eyre went to London

iqo Charlotte Bronte at Home

August 24th, and was accepted as soon as
it was read, the second reader to whom the
first passed it, sitting up all night to finish it.

In our day of careful typography, triple
proof-readings, and elaborate illustration,
we catch our breaths in reading that the
three- volume novel was "out" in less
than a month from the date of acceptance.
Jane Eyre saw the light, October 16, 1847.

By the opening of the New Year, the
public and the critics of both hemispheres
were speculating as to the personality of
" Currer Bell," and the novel was the
" rage " of the literary season.

" 1 hardly expected that a book by an
unknown author could find readers," was
Charlotte's modest comment upon her
triumph when time had made her reputa-
tion sure.

The tremendous venture was known be-
forehand to nobody except Emily and
Anne. The former had sent the MS. of
Wuthering Heights to a different firm, by
whom it was accepted, but without enthu-
siasm, and published tardily. Anne com-
mitted Agnes Grey to the same house with
a like result. Ellen Nussey heard nothing,
in that August visit, of any of the three

Success of ' ' Jane Eyre " i Q i

books. Each sister had bound herself sol-
emnly to the others not to divulge her
secret without the full concurrence of all
three. The decided aversion to speaking
freely of one's brain-children, especially
when in embryo, natural to authors of fine
sensibilities and true reverence for the gift
that is in them, was almost excessive with
the Brontes — Branwell always excepted.
Even after years of popular favour had
taught Charlotte to hearken to discussions
of characters, situations, and style without
painful embarrassment, it was evident to
her best friends that the subject was deli-
cate and sacred in her esteem. It would
have cost her a hard struggle to take even
trusty and dear Ellen into her confidence
had she been sanguine of success. The
sharp disappointment attendant upon the
former experiment, the recollection of
the fragile lily that had perished with the
blooming, would have closed' the lips of
the three most nearly interested in risk and
failure had other reasons for reticence been
lacking.

It was, then, with a strange commingling
of emotions — delicacy, distrust, and exult-
ation — that Charlotte carried a copy oi Jane

192 Charlotte Bronte at Home

Eyre, with a batch of press-notices, into
her father's study one afternoon, and, ap-
proaching his chair, said, as diffidently as
in the days when he set for her the tasli of
an abstract or a composition: " Papa ! I 've
been writing a book."

When he feared her minute handwriting
"might try his eyes," if he undertoolc to
read it, she informed him that it was printed.
At his ejaculation of dismay over the cer-
tain expense and probable failure of an ob-
scure writer, she offered to read some of
the reviews aloud, and having allayed his
apprehensions somewhat, left book and
papers in his hands and slipped away as
noiselessly as the shadows to which she
was often hkened.

Everybody has heard of his sentence of
guarded praise, uttered in grim satisfaction
fully comprehended by the triad assembled
in the parlour at tea-time, fearful of, yet
impatient for, his entrance.

" Girls ! do you know Charlotte has been
writing a book, and it is much better than
likely ? "

Standing in the parlour, last year, I re-
produced to myself, and vividly, the scene,
■ — the plainly laid table, Emily behind the

Success of "Jane Eyre " 193

tea-tray ; Charlotte seated opposite to Anne,
both pale and nervous with suspense, and
the tall, gaunt figure of the father, pausing
beside the vacant chair at the foot of the
board to enunciate the pregnant phrase, a
benevolent twinkle in his eyes, a smile he
could not suppress hovering about his
mobile mouth.

Then, doubtless, the tea was poured
and drunk, the bread-and-butter passed,
and parish news touched upon, as if no-
thing uncommon had happened, as if literary
circles were not commoved by the appari-
tion of the new star, and every English and
American review were not conjecturing,
surmising, and affirming as to Jane Eyre's
creator, whether masculine or feminine.
Northerner or Southron, delineator or ro-
mancist, and Smith & Elder's mails were
not swollen by letters addressed to the
mysterious " Currer Bell."

It was impossible that she, being human,
should not have derived profound gratifica-
tion and solemn content from the reward of
the travail of her soul and mind. Elated
she was not, then or ever. The side of
the dual existence she was henceforward to
lead with which we have most to do was

194 Charlotte Bronte at Home

ballasted by too great and grievous sorrows
not to keep within its deeply worn grooves.

Mrs. Gaskell tells us that Charlotte's first
thought, when assured of considerable (for
her) pecuniary gains from the successful
book, was of the "little sister," drooping
from too sedentary a life, and bowed to
the dust in spirit by the knowledge and
sight of Branwell's excesses. As soon as
the spring opened, Anne must have change
of air at the seashore or elsewhere,
strengthening food, such as they could now
afford to buy, and the recreations she had
missed in her shadowed childhood and
girlhood.

But for the inward brightness shed by
these hopes, and the intellectual enjoyment
of boxes of books forwarded by her pub-
lishers, and by her correspondence with
Mr. Williams, the routine of home and
parish duties was as uneventful and colour-
less as ever.

Untiljune ! Then, a letter from Charlotte's
publishers broke like a bomb-shell into the
little group of student authors. Smith,
Elder & Co. had heard, through their Amer-
ican correspondence, that arrangements
had been made by a London house for the

Hurried Trip to London 195

reprint in the United States of a new bool<
by the author of Jane Eyre. Upon investi-
gation it transpired that the work in ques-
tion — Wuthering Heights — together with
Agnes Grey and " Acton Bell's " new novel,
The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, now in press —
was believed by the trade to be from the
pen of one and the same author, his iden-
tity being veiled under three noms deplume,
Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell.

In the singleness of their integrity the
sisters looked upon the assertion as a slur
upon their veracity and honesty. We
smile at, while respecting, the method — to
their way of thinking the only way of
clearing themselves — chosen and instantly
acted upon by the unsophisticated parties
under suspicion. Charlotte and Anne set
out for London on the afternoon of the day
that brought the agitating letter. Their
trunk was sent a little after noon by a car-
rier's cart to Keighley, the nearest railway
station. Dressed for the eventful journey,
Charlotte and Anne sat down to an early
tea, eating little, as we may imagine, and
then began the four-mile walk in good
season to catch the night train. A heavy
shower wet them to the skin on the road.

196 Charlotte Bronte at Home

but they pressed on. Defamation of char-
acter was too serious a peril for them to
mindtrifleswhenbentuponself-justifi cation.

They went straight from the Chapter
Coffee-house (where, odd as it may seem,
they elected to lodge because their father
used to put up there as a young man) to
Smith & Elder's Cornhill office, amazing the
senior partner by presenting the letter he had
sent to " Currer Bell." Up to now he and
Mr. Williams had written to their author
as a man. The publisher turned it over in
his hand, and looked bewildered from his
own handwriting to the quaint little women
standing side by side at the full height of
their small stature.

"Where did you get this?" he asked,
naturally. Charlotte was spokeswoman,
introducing herself as "Currer Bell," her
companion as "Acton." In his delight at
the solution of more than one vexed ques-
tion, Mr. Smith would have called together
a coterie of literary people at his house to
meet the unmasked celebrities, but the
visitors would not consent. They would
retain their incognita to everybody in Lon-
don but himself and his partners. After
an hour's chat they trudged back to their

Hurried Trip to London 1Q7

quaint quarters, never noticing that they
were the only women in the house, and
Charlotte went to bed with a violent sick
headache, the penalty she usually paid for
any unwonted excitement.

Mr. Smith so far prevailed over their shy-
ness as to induce them to accompany him
and his mother to the Opera that night,
where, as Charlotte wrote to Ellen, "fine
ladies and gentlemen glanced at us with a
slight, graceful superciliousness, quite war-
ranted by the circumstances. Still I felt
pleasurably excited, in spite of headache,
sickness, and conscious clownishness, and
1 saw Anne was calm and gentle, which
she always is."

The "circumstances" were the plain
black silk gowns, long-sleeved and high-
necked, made in obsolete fashion by a
Haworth dressmaker, and the general air
of rusticity that clung to the novices in the
gay scene. Charlotte admits the evident
provocation of the " graceful supercilious-
ness " without a tinge of false shame. She
always rated herself — person and mind — far
below the standard set for her by others.

The country girls went to church on
Sunday, and afterwards to dine with the

198 Charlotte Bronte at Home

hospitable Smiths; on Monday, under their
pilotage, to the Royal Academy and the
National Gallery; to dinner again at the
Smiths', and to tea at Mr. Williams's.

On Tuesday night they were safe at
home, wearied out, dazed, and tremulous
under the burden of novel experience. "My
face looking grey and very old/' says Char-
lotte, "with strange, deep lines ploughed
in it. My eyes stared unnaturally. I was
weak, and yet restless. "

Anne suffered less from the effects of
this her first sight of London. Both were
content in having accomplished the aim and
end of the startling adventure. They had
proved to the skeptic the existence of two
Bells, and he had accepted their testimony
as to the existence of the third. Except
to the publishers and their immediate fam-
ilies, they were the "Misses Brown" from
Yorkshire. "Shy and reserved little coun-
trywomen, with not much to say," is Mrs.
Gaskell's note upon the passing impression
they made on such strangers as they chanced
to encounter.

Charlotte, as we have seen, "accepted
the situation " with, apparently, no thought
of the nations praising her near and afar off.

CHAPTER XIV

branwell's death — Emily's illness and
death a "dreary calm"

THE events of the last quarter of the
year 1848 will be told here, for the
most part, by interweaving extracts from
Charlotte's letters into a consecutive narra-
tive. No hand but hers could have sketched
them so graphically:

"October 9, 1848.
'' The past three weeks have been a dark interval in
our humble home. Branwell's constitution had been
tailing last all the summer, but still, neither the doctors
nor himself thought him so near his end as he was. He
was entirely confined to his bed but for one single day,
and was in the village two days before his death. He
died, after twenty minutes' struggle, on Sunday morn-
ing, September 24. He was perfectly conscious 'till the
last agony came on. His mind had undergone the pe-
culiar change which frequently precedes death, two
days previously ; the calm of better feelings filled it ; a
return of natural affection marked his last moments.

igg

200 Charlotte Bronte at Home

" The remembrance of this strange change now com-
forts my poor father greatly. I myself, with painful,
mournful joy, heard him praying softly in his dying
moments, and to the last prayer which my father offered
up at his bedside, he added ' Amen ! ' How unusual
that word appeared from his lips you cannot conceive.
Akin to this alteration was that in his feelings towards
his relations. All the bitterness seemed gone.

" He is in God's hands now, and the All-Powerful is
likewise the All-Merciful. A deep conviction that he
rests at last — rests well after his brief, erring, suffering,
feverish life — fills and quiets my mind. The final separa-
tion, the spectacle of his pale corpse, gave me more
acute, bitter pain than 1 could have imagined. Till the
last hour comes, we never know how much we can
forgive, pity, regret, a near relative. All his vices were,
and are, nothing now ; we remember only his woes.

" My poor father naturally thought more of his only
son than of his daughters, and much and long as he had
suffered on his account, he cried out for his loss like
David for that of Absalom — ' My son ! my son ! ' and
refused to be cotnforted. And then, when I ought to
have been able to collect my strength and be at hand to
support him, I fell ill with an illness whose approaches I
had felt for some time previously, and of which the crisis
was hastened by the care and trouble of the death scene
— the first I had ever witnessed.

" ' We have hurried our dead out of our sight.' A
lull begins to succeed the tumult of last week. It is not
permitted us to grieve for him who is gone as others
grieve for those they lose. The removal of our only
brother must necessarily be regarded by us rather in the
light of a mercy than a chastisement. Branwell was his
father's and his sisters' pride and hope in boyhood, but

Branwell's Death 201

since manhood the case has been otherwise. It has
been our lot to see him take a wrong bent ; to hope,
expect, wait his return to the right path ; to know the
sickness of hope deferred, the dismay of prayer baffled ;
to experience despair at last, — and now to behold the
sudden, early, obscure close of what might have been a
noble career. Nothing remains of him but a memory of
errors and sufferings.

"My unhappy brother never knew what his sisters
had done in literature. He was not aware that they
had ever published a line. We could not tell him of
our efforts for fear of causing him too deep a pang of
remorse for his own time misspent and talents misap-
plied. Now, he will never know. 1 cannot dwell
longer on the subject at present. It is too painful." *

To Miss Mary F. Robinson, the enthusi-
astic biographer of Emily Bronte, we are
indebted for other particulars of that last
scene of a life that was a confused web of
promise and pitiful failure, of folly, and of
tragedy :

" He insisted upon getting up. If he had succumbed
to the horrors of life he would defy the horrors of ex-
tinction. He would die as he thought no one had ever
died before, — standing. So, like some ancient Celtic
hero, when the last agony began, he rose to his feet.
Hushed and awe-stricken, the old father, praying Anne,
and loving Emily, looked on. He rose to his feet and
died erect, after twenty minutes' struggle."

Charlotte fondly imagined that the suc-

* Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle, page 139.

202 Charlotte Bronte at Home

cesses they had been at such pains to hide
from him — lest the contrast with the ruin
he had made of his own talents and oppor-
tunities might add a barb to the remorse
she credited him with feeling — never came
to his knowledge. His friend and memori-
alist, Mr. Grundy, reports Branwell as
boasting to his boon companions, over their
cups, that he had written Wuthering
Heights, entire or in part, and from an-
other source we have a picture of the brag-
gart, seated in his three-cornered chair in
the parlour of the Black Bull, discours-
ing in tipsy seriousness upon his sisters'
achievements and the comparative merits
of the three books they had published.

How much of this dishonouring story
is true and how much the work of his
friends, (!) imaginations, when there was no
longer any one alive who could contradict
their statements, is not for us to decide.
We know the wretched boy to have been
a boastful liar where other women's charac-
ters were concerned. He was not superior
to the meanness of traducing his own
flesh and blood, had the opportunity been
afforded him. We can only hope, in
mercy to his memory, that it was not.

Emily's Illness 203

Dismiss we the unspeakably sad and
terrible story of the Castaway, in Charlotte's
words :

" In God's hands we leave him ; He sees
not as man sees."

It is an old saying in Yorkshire, as in
other parts of England, that when Death
enters a house he has not visited in a long
time, he leaves the door ajar in going out
with his burden. More than twenty years
had passed since the pavement of the Ha-
worth Church was disturbed to lay the
body of Elizabeth Bronte by her mother
and her sister Maria. Looking backward,
a shadow falls for us across the page on
which Charlotte wrote a week after Bran-
well's burial :

"Anne is always delicate, and Emily has
a cough and cold at present."

The shadow lowers above another entry,
dated October 29th :

" I feel much more uneasy about my sister than my-
self just now. Emily's cold and cough are veiy obsti-
nate. 1 fear she has pain in her chest, and I sometimes
catch a shortness in her breathing, when she has moved
at all quickly. She looks very thin and pale. Her re-
served nature occasions me great uneasiness of mind. It
is useless to question her ; you get no answers. It is

204 Charlotte Bronte at Home

still more useless to recommend remedies. They are
never adopted."

Yet more ominous is the bulletin of
November 23d :

' ' 1 told you Emily was ill in my last letter. She is
very ill. I believe, if you were to see her, your impres-
sion would be that there is no hope. A more hollow,
wasted, pallid aspect I have not beheld. The deep,
tight cough continues ; the breathing, after the least ex-
ertion, is a rapid pant ; and these symptoms are accom-
panied by pains in the chest and side. Her pulse, the
only time she allowed it to be felt, was found to beat
1 1 5 per minute. In this state she resolutely refuses to
see a doctor. She will give no explanation of her feel-
ings; — she will scarcely allow her feelings to be alluded
to. Our position is, and has been for some weeks, ex-
quisitely painful. God only knows how all this is to
terminate. I think Emily seems the nearest thing to my
heart in the world.

" December loth.

" Hope and fear fluctuate daily. The pain in her
side and chest is better ; the cough, the shortness of
breath, the extreme emaciation, continue. As her re-
pugnance to see a medical man continues immutable — as
she declares no ' poisoning doctor ' shall come near
her, — 1 have written, unknown to her, to an eminent
physician in London, giving as minute a statement of
her case and symptoms as 1 could draw up, and request-
ing an opinion. . The crab-cheese arrived safely.
Emily has just reminded me to thank you for it. It
looks very nice. I wish she were well enough to
eat it ! "

Emily's Illness 205

Emily had not passed the threshold
of the Parsonage since she followed her
brother's coffin through the dreadful little
door in the wall of the churchward front
yard, and down the paved walk into the
church, where the funeral service was read.
Charlotte and Anne had never been robust ;
Emily had laughed to scorn the thought of
physical ailment to her own lithe, active
self. She " never minded weather." Wet
feet, even a drenching to the skin from a
winter storm or a thunder-cloud, were bag-
atelles. A year before, Anne had written
to Ellen Nussey that, while she and Char-
lotte had suffered much from the prevalent
east wind, "Emily considers it a very un-
interesting wind, but it does not affect her
nervous system." In fact, she denied the
existence of a nervous system in her own
case.

On the morning of December 19th she
lay in bed later than usual, and Charlotte
made an excuse for a visit of anxious in-
quiry — or, rather, inspection, for she dared
not ask a question — by taking in to her
sister a bit of heather she had been out
upon the moors to seek. She had actually
found a spray in bloom in a sheltered nook,

2o6 Charlotte Bronte at Home

and displayed it proudly, laying it upon
Emily's pillow. Although the cool touch
of the pale purple flowers upon her cheek
caused the invalid to lift her languid eyelids,
she took no notice of them. The lids
drooped heavily over the dim eyes, and
Charlotte left her, sick of soul and dread-
ing the worst, to make her despairing re-
port to Anne in the parlour. Presently
they heard a faint movement in the cham-
ber overhead. Emily was up and, as was
her habit, resolutely dressing herself. She
sat by the fire, slowly combing her weight
of chestnut-brown hair, when the comb
caught in the rich masses and fell into the
grate. In the extremity of weakness Emily
lay back in her chair, panting for breath,
and unable to stoop over to recover the
comb. Martha, Tabby's young assistant,
was attracted from the hall by the smell of
burning bone, and Emily appealed to her
with a half-laugh, — "My comb is down
there ! I am too weak to pick it up ! "

Finishing her toilet by slow and painful
stages, she wrapped a shawl about her,
and holding by the wall to steady her steps,
began the descent to the lower floor. Down
the crooked stairway, past the well where

Emily's Illness 207

her strong young arms had held down and
"punished " poor Keeper — ^still her devoted
thrall — she staggered, over the cruelly cold
flags of the hall, to the parlour door. Anne
sat by the hearth, her mending basket be-
side her. Charlotte was writing at the
table in the middle of the room. Both
looked up, but neither ventured to speak
while Emily tottered across the floor to the
hard, straight sofa, and sat down, fitted
her thimble to her clammy finger, and took
up a piece of plain sewing.

The scratching of Charlotte's pen filled
up the brief pauses between the labouring
breaths, each of which was a needle-thrust
in the hearts of the listeners.

This was what Charlotte was saying to
Ellen :

"I should have written to you before, if I had had
one word of hope to say, but I have not. She grows
daily weaker. The physician's opinion was expressed
too obscurely to be of use. He sent some medicine
which she would not take. Moments so dark as these
1 have never known. I pray for God's support to us all.
Hitherto He has granted it.

" I hope still, for 1 must hope. She is as dear to me
as life. If 1 let the faintness of despair reach my heart 1
shall become worthless. The attack was, 1 believe, in
the first place, inflammation of the lungs. It ought to
have been met promptly in time."

2o8 Charlotte Bronte at Home

The ungenial winter noon saw the aban-
donment of the poor effort at industry.
Emily put aside her work, and lay down
upon the sofa.

At her husky whisper Charlotte hastened
to her.

' ' If you — will— send for a — doctor now,
I will — see — him ! "

Before he could arrive, the last throes
were upon her. She grappled with Death
as if she were lookmg into his face, fought
breath by breath to wrest her life from his
clutch. Her sisters begged her, with tears,
to let them get her to bed. Raising herself
upon one hand, she motioned them away
with the other.

"No ! no !"

Voice, breath, and heart-beat went with
the protest. She dropped back upon the
sofa, dead — and free !

In six days more, Charlotte sent another
letter to her one confidante :

" Emily suffers no more from pain or weakness now.
She never will suffer more in this world. She is gone,
after a short, hard conflict. She died on Tuesday, the
very day 1 wrote to you. 1 thought it very possible she
might be with us still for weeks, and a few hours after-
wards she was in Eternity.

" Yes ! there is no Emily in time or on earth now.

Emily's Death 209

Yesterday we put her poor wasted mortal frame quietly
under the church pavement. We are very calm at
present. Why should we be otherwise ? The anguish
of seeing her suffer is over ; the spectacle of the pains of
death is gone by ; the funeral day is past. We feel she
is at peace. No need now to tremble for the hard frost
and the keen wind. Emily does not feel them. She
died in a time of promise. We saw her taken from life
in its prime. But it is God's will, and the place where
she is gone is better than that she has left.

"God has sustained me in a way that 1 marvel at,
through such agony as I had not conceived."*

" Day by day," — she wrote three years afterwards, —
"when 1 saw with what a front she met suffering, 1
looked on her with an anguish of wonder and love. I
have seen nothing like it, but, indeed, 1 have never
seen her parallel in anything. Stronger than a man,
simpler than a child, her nature stood alone. The aw-
ful point was, that, while full of ruth for others, on her-
self she had no pity ; the spirit was inexorable to the
flesh ; from the trembling hand, the unnerved limbs, the
fading eyes, the same service was exacted as they had
rendered in health."

Mrs. Gaskell narrates how Keeper, Em-
ily's bulldog ("Tartar") joined the three
mourners who walked close behind the
coffin as it left the house, followed them
into the church, and returned home with
them when the service was over. Going
directly up-stairs, he stretched his large bulk

* Mrs. Gaskell.
14

210 Charlotte Bronte at Home

across the threshold of his dead mistress's
door, and howled mournfully for hours.
He visited the place every day for weeks,
in evident expectation that the door would
open and Emily answer his call. "He
never recovered his cheerfulness," says
Charlotte.

The Christmas of 1848 was a period of
"dreary calm in the midst of which" the
human mourners " sought resignation."

" My father and my sister Anne are far from well.
As for me, God has hitherto most graciously sustained
me. I am not ill ; I can get through daily duties, and
do something towards keeping hope and energy alive in
our mourning household. My father says to me almost
hourly, — " Charlotte, you must bear up ! 1 shall sink if
you fail me.' These words, you can conceive, are a
stimulus to nature. The sight, too, of my sister Anne's
very still, but deep sorrow wakens in me such fear for
her that I cannot falter. Somebody must cheer the rest.

" So 1 will not now ask why Emily was torn from us
in the fulness of our attachment ; why her existence now
lies like a field of green corn trodden down — like a tree
in full bearing struck at the root. 1 will only say,
sweet is rest after labour, and calm after tempest, and
repeat again and again that Emily knows that now."*

The first keen anguish of mourning for
the lost darling had hardly subsided into
the slow torture of missing her, every hour
* Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle, page 1 75.

A " Dreary Calm " 211

and minute of lives that must evermore
move on without her, when the awful
Shade halted for the third time before the
door he had left ajar.

CHAPTER XV

"SLOW DARK MARCH OF THE DAYS" — ANNE'S

DECLINE HER DEATH AND BURIAL AT

SCARBORO' — charlotte's RETURN HOME

"SHIRLEY"

AGAIN we will let Charlotte's letters
take up the sad story:

" January lo, 1849,
" Atjne had a very tolerable day yesterday, and a
pretty quiet night, though she did not sleep much. 1
have just dressed the blister, and she is risen and come
down-stairs. She looks somewhat pale and sickjy.
She has had one dose of the cod-liver oil.

" 1 am trying to hope, but the day is windy, cloudy,
and stormy. My spirits fall, at intervals, very low.
Then 1 look where you counsel me to look, — beyond
earthly tempests and sorrows. In the night I awake
and long for morning. Then my heart is wrung !

" January 15.
" I can scarcely say that Anne is worse, nor can I
say she is better. Her cough is most troublesoine at

Anne's Decline 213

night, but rarely violent. She is too precious not to be
cherished with all the fostering strength I have.

" The days pass in a slow dark march. The nights
are the test, — the sudden wakings from restless sleep,
the revived knowledge that one is in her grave, and an-
other, not at my side, but in a separate and a sick bed.
However, God is over all.

" February nth.

"Anne continues very much in the same state. I
tremble at the thought of any change to cold wind or
frost. Would that March were well over ! Her mind
seems generally serene, and her sufferings are, hitherto,
nothing like Emily's. The thought of what is to come
grows more familiar to my mind, but it is a sad, dreary
guest."

In March, Ellen Nussey urged affection-
ately that she might be allowed to accom-
pany Anne to the milder seacoast as soon
as the weather grew mild enough for the
invalid's removal. One of the few of Anne
Bronte's letters that remain to us was
written in acknowledgment of this friendly
offer. After thanking Miss Nussey for her
kindness and accepting the proposal, —
should she be able to try change of air, —
she goes on to speak frankly of the chances
of her recovery, weighing them with a
calm, collected spirit that enhances our re-
spect for the sweet youngling of the sadly
diminished flock.

214 Charlotte Bronte at Home

" I have no horror of death. If 1 thought it inevitable
I thinJc I could quietly resign myself to the prospect, in
the hope that you, dear iVliss Ellen, would give as much
of your company as you possibly could to Charlotte, and
be a sister to her in my stead.

" But 1 wish it would please God to spare me, not
only for Papa's and Charlotte's sakes, but because 1 long
to do some good in the world before I leave it. 1 have
many schemes in my head for future practice — humble
and limited, indeed — still 1 should not like them all to
come to nothing, and myself to have lived to so little
purpose. But God's will be done ! " *

Charlotte and Ellen took her to Scarboro'
on May 24th. She died there, quietly, on
the 28th. Her last words were : "Take
courage, Charlotte ! take courage 1 "

She was buried at Scarboro', Charlotte
and Ellen being the only mourners present.

To her London friend, Mr. Williams,
Charlotte wrote on June 25th :

" I am now again at home, where I returned last
Thursday. 1 call it home still, much as London would
be called London, if an earthquake should shake its
streets to ruins.

" But let me not be ungrateful ! Haworth Parsonage
is still a home for me, and not quite a ruined or desolate
home either. Papa is here, and two most affectionate
and faithful servants, and two old dogs, in their way as
faithful and affectionate. The ecstasy of these poor
animals, when 1 came in, was something singular. I am
* Mrs. Gaskell,

"Shirley" 215

certain they thought that, as I was returned, my sisters
were not far behind. But here my sisters will come no
more. Keeper may visit Emily's little bed-room — as he
still does, day by day — and Flossy may look wistfully
around for Anne. They will never see them again — nor
shall 1 — at least the human part of me.

" Waking, I think, sleeping, 1 dream of them ; and 1
cannot recall them as they were in health. Still they
appear to me in sickness and suffering.

" All this bitterness must be tasted. The pain must
be undergone. Its poignancy, 1 trust, will be blunted
one day. Ellen would have come back with me, but 1
would not let her. I knew it would be better to face
the desolation at once — later or sooner, the sharp pang
must be experienced.

" Labour must be the cure — not sympathy. Labour
is the only radical cure for rooted sorrow. The society
of a calm, serenely cheerful companion — such as Ellen —
soothes pain like a soft opiate ; but 1 find it does not
probe, or heal, the wound. Sharper, more severe means
are necessary to make a remedy."

In this persuasion the brave soul gathered
up its forces to obey its own prescription.
Shirley was more than half finished at the
time Branwell died. She had not touched
the MS. since. The last chapters she had
written were read aloud to Emily and
Anne, and the future plan of the book was
discussed by the three, while pacing the
floor in the firelight after ten o'clock at
night.

2i6 Charlotte Bronte at Home

The least sentimental reader must shud-
der, as at a touch upon a raw surface — or
the naked heart — in thinking what the re-
opening of desk and portfolio must have
been to the desolate mourner in the more
than ever quiet house, in reviewing the
scenes after writing and reading which she
had laid aside her pen. The last chapter
read aloud to her audience of two was the
twenty-third — "An Evening Out." Anne's
gentle praises, and Emily's trenchant, but
never unkindly, criticisms, must have anno-
tated each paragraph for her. The heading
of the new chapter, not one line of which
either of her sisters was ever to hear, was
— fitly enough — ■' ' The Valley of the Shadow
of Death."

The opening passage is too long to be
transcribed here. He who peruses it in the
recollection of the conditions under which
it was penned can discern the trail of life-
blood in every line. We trace the same in
other portions of this twenty-fourth chap-
ter. It is as if the writer had not yet taken
firm hold of her pen, the wand that opened
for her the gates to the Wonderland of
Imagination, wherein she was to find tem-
porary surcease of pain. Humanly speak-

"Shirley" 217

ing, Shirley was her salvation. She
wrought indefatigably upon it all through
the August days, forcing herself to think
of her Other World and the characters with
which she had peopled it, when the song
of the lark floated in at her windows in the
dewy mornings ; as she opened her eyes
upon the square bulk of the church-tower
opposite her window, black against the
flushing sky ; when the blossoming heather
covered "Emily's moors" as with cool
purple mist, and plover and lapwing sang
and whistled in thickets of gorse and bil-
berry. Ellen Nussey entreated that she
might come to Haworth, and share, if she
could not enliven, her friend's solitude.
Charlotte would not consent while the un-
finished MS. lay in her desk. "This one
thing I do " was the rule to which she held
herself without complaint or wavering.
She was straitened with the divine com-
pulsion of true genius until it was accom-
plished.

Not until strait and stress were over did
she speak, even to Ellen, of the desolation
of the evenings when, by the force of
habit, she put up paper and pen at the
stroke of ten, and began pacing the floor

2i8 Charlotte Bronte at Home

in the old way that used to be sweet, the
soft fall of her steps accentuating the still-
ness that had settled with nightfall in every
room. When the wind shook the shrubs
under the windows she was thrilled by the
fancy of the sweeping garments of viewless
visitants stealing up the path to look in
upon her loneliness. The cry of an August
gale at the closed sashes on one wild, wet
night sounded to her like the voices of her
sisters, wandering round and round the
house, calling inarticulately upon her.

Insomnia and close application to her
desk brought on a severe but short attack
of illness, just as the last page was written.

" It is gone now," she told Ellen Nussey,
thankfully, September loth. " It is the first
from which I have suffered since my return
from the seaside."

Upon the same page she makes modest
mention of the completed task:

"My piece of work is at last finished,
and dispatched to its destination. You
must now tell me when there is a chance
of your being able to come here."

Before the visit could be paid, there was
a minor domestic catastrophe at Haworth.
Tabby had a serious fall, just when the

"Shirley" 219

younger servant was ill in bed. Every
liousekeeper, even if she be not a literary
worker, will appreciate the sketch Char-
lotte sent off to Ellen of the general collapse
of her working forces, physical, mental,
and moral :

" I fairly broke down for ten minutes — sat and cried
like a fool. Tabby could neither stand nor walk. Papa
had just been declaring that Martha was in imminent
danger, 1 was myself depressed with headache and
sickness. That day I hardly knew what to do, or
where to turn.

" Thank God ! Martha is now convalescent. Tabby,
1 trust, will be better soon. Papa is pretty well. 1
have the satisfaction of knowing that my publishers are
delighted with what 1 sent them. This supports me.
But life is a battle. May we all be enabled to fight it
well ! "

Shirley, as every one at all conversant
with modern belles lettres knows, was a
superb triumph, and the fidelity of the au-
thor's pictures of Yorkshire scenes and
people in a very brief time "ran her to
earth," in sporting phrase. By degrees the
incognita was abandoned. Complimentary
letters rained in upon her from all quarters.
The Smiths induced her to visit them in
London, where she met Thackeray, Miss
Martineau, and a host of lesser literary

220 Charlotte Bronte at Home

lights. She told Mary Taylor, in after-days,
that her solitary life had disqualified her
for society. " I had become unready, nerv-
ous, irritable, excitable, and either incapa-
ble of speech, or I talked rapidly. For
swarms of people I don't care ! "

We have, however, a more pleasing in-
stance of her manner of acquitting herself
in her new sphere from an eye-witness
of her first meeting with Miss Martineau.
The latter was lodging in London, and
" Currer Bell " was invited to take afternoon
tea with her.

" Miss Bronte was announced, and in came a young
looking lady, almost childlike in stature, in a deep
mourning dress, neat as a Quaker's, with her beautiful
hair smooth and brown, her fine eyes blazing with
meaning, and her sensible face indicating a habit of
self-control. She came — hesitated a moment at finding
four or five people assembled, — then, went straight to
Miss Martineau with intuitive recognition, and with the
freemasonry of good feeling and gentle breeding, she
soon became as one of the family seated around the
tea-table."

The delight evinced by her Yorkshire
neighbours in the discovery that, as Martha
told her young mistress, " Miss Bronte had
been and written two books — the grandest
books that ever was seen ! " touched the

"Shirley" 221

Parson's daughter more nearly than the
plaudits of editorial critics. There is a sus-
picion of tears in the jesting tone in which
she informs Ellen that "the Haworth peo-
ple have been making great fools of them-
selves about Shirley."

She "valued," too, "more than testi-
monies from higher sources, a scrap of
paper which came into her hands without
the knowledge of the writer — a poor work-
ing man of this village, a Dissenter. The
document is a sort of record of his feelings
after reading y^we Eyre."

" On one point do 1 feel vulnerable,'' she says to her
publishers at the height of her fame. " I should grieve
to see my father's peace of mind perturbed on my ac-
count ; for which reason 1 keep my author's existence
as much as possible out of his way. 1 have always
given him a carefully diluted and modified account of
the success of Jane Eyre, — ^just what would please with-
out startling him. The book is not mentioned between
us once a month."

Another visit to London was made in
1850. There she had a glimpse of the
Duke of Wellington; a morning in the
gallery of the House of Commons; an in-
terview with one of her most prominent
critics, George Henry Lewes (afterwards
the husband of "George Eliot ") ; calls from

222 Charlotte Bronte at Home

titled admirers and learned dignitaries, —
and "last, not least, an interview with Mr.
Thackeray, who made a morning call, and
sat two hours." The London experience
was followed by a trip to Scotland, includ-
ing a stay of a few days in Edinboro'.

"My dear sir," she is moved to tell her
publisher, "do not think I blaspheme when
I tell you that your great London, as com-
pared to Dun-Edin, is as prose compared
to poetry, or as a great, rumbling, rambling,
heavy epic compared to a lyric, brief,
bright, clear, and vital as a flash of light-
ning."

In September she was the guest of Sir
James and Lady Kay Shuttleworth at their
country-seat near Windermere in the Lake
Country, and there was introduced to her
future friend and biographer, Mrs. Gaskell.
To this lady, more than to all other of
Charlotte's delineators, we owe our definite
impressions of Miss Bronte's personelle.

"She is (as she calls herself) undeveloped, thin, and
more than half a head shorter than I am," Mrs. Gaskell
wrote while under the same roof with the famous author.
"She has soft, brown hair, not very dark ; eyes, very
good and expressive, looking straight and open at you,
of the same colour as her hair ; a large mouth ; the fore-
head square, broad, and rather overhanging. She has a

" Wuthering Heights " 22^

very sweet voice ; rather hesitates in choosing her ex-
pressions, but when chosen they seem without an effort
admirable, and just befitting the occasion. There is
nothing overstrained, but perfectly simple.''

From the home-nest at Haworth, always
resought gratefully after the dazzling epi-
sodes we have enumerated, we have a few
lines introductory to a letter to a literary
friend, that "indicate" with true artistic
skill what her life was at this time (1850) :

' ' Papa and 1 have just had tea ; he is sitting quietly
in his room, and I in mine ; storms of rain are sweeping
over the garden and church-yard ; as to the moors, they
are hidden in deep fog. Though alone, 1 am not un-
happy. 1 have a thousand things to be thankful for, and
amongst the rest that this morning I received a letter
from you, and that this evening 1 have the privilege of
answering it."

In the same September she began, at Mr.
Smith's request, the "sacred duty" of
editing new editions of Wuthering Heights
and Agnes Grey.

It was reserved for a later generation of
reviewers, represented by Swinburne, Do-
bell, and Matthew Arnold, to do justice to
the genius that produced Wuthering Heights.

Charlotte was as nearly resentful as it
was in her nature to be, that Emily went
down to her grave before one note of the

224 Charlotte Bronte at Home

chorus of praise now chanted in her honour
reached her ears. Strange as it may appear
to us, Agnes Grey, a third-rate, colourless
story of governess life, fared better with
public and critics than Emily's masterly
work. We wish, almost passionately, that
the surviving sister who strove, while she
lived, to win for the dead the honest meed
of appreciation, had foreknown the place
to be assigned her in forty years' time ;
that one of the greatest of nineteenth-cen-
tury poets would declare that Emily Bronte's
soul,

" Knew no fellow for might,
Passion, vehemence, grief,
Daring, since Byron died."

The performance of the " sacred duty "
cost the editor dear. "The reading over
of papers, the renewal of remembrances,
brought back the pang of bereavement and
occasioned a depression of spirits well-nigh
intolerable."

A timely and pressing invitation to Miss
Martineau's was accepted in a sort of sad
desperation as soon as the revised books
were sent to the publishers. From Amble-
side she wrote to Ellen Nussey of the

ELLEN NUSSEY (AT THE AGE OF 65'

FROM A DRAWING BY MISS E. TAYLOR

Ellen Nussey 225

"temporary relief, at least, by change of air and scene,
from the heavy burden of depression which, I confess,
has for nearly three months been sinking me to the earth.
1 shall never forget last autumn ! Some days and nights
have been cruel ; but now, having once told you this, I
need say no more on the subject. My loathing of soli-
tude grew extreme ; my recollection of my sisters intol-
erably poignant. I have truly enjoyed my visit
here. 1 have seen a good many people, and all have
been so marvellously kind ; not the least so the family
of Dr. Arnold. Miss Martineau 1 relish inexpressibly."

Nevertheless, when in the early spring of
181^1 she had a return of what threatened
" to crush her with a day-and-night-mare,"
she would not seek respite or cure from the
like means.

" It will not do to get into the habit of
running away from home, and thus tem-
porarily evading an oppression, instead of
facing, wrestling with, and conquering it —
or being conquered by it ! "

The valiant creature would not be con-
quered any more than she would "run
away." She indulged herself, however,
with a long visit from Ellen Nussey.

" No new friend, however lofty or profound in intel-
lect, not even Miss Martineau herself, could be to me
what Ellen is ; yet she is no more than a conscientious,
observant, calm, well-bred Yorkshire girl," she once

226 Charlotte Bronte at Home

told Mr. Williams. " She is good ; she is true ; she is
faithful, and I love her. Just now 1 am enjoying the
treat of her society, and she makes me indolent and
negligent. I am too busy talking to her all day to do
anything else."

This sort of busy indolence was good for
the morbid soul. The sore heart healed
under the influence of such natural, whole-
some companionship as other old school-
fellows enjoy who have never drifted apart
in place or interests, least of all, in heart and
sympathy.

CHAPTER XVI

MR. JAMES TAYLOR AND HIS REJECTED AD-
DRESSES — VISIT TO ANNE'S GRAVE " VIL-

LETTE " WRITTEN — ANOTHER NOTABLE
SUCCESS

UPON one subject — newer by far than
school-day experiences, and of more
imminent importance than literary triumphs
— Charlotte would not be questioned or
bantered by her one intimate friend.

In August, 1849, Smith & Elder had
notified iVIiss Bronte of their wish to send
a gentleman connected with their house to
Haworth, to receive the valuable manu-
script just completed — Shirley. Their
agent, Mr. James Taylor, was Mr. W. S.
Williams's colleague as reader and adviser
for the firm. Charlotte, in reply, offered
"the homely hospitalities of the Parson-
age," warning the prospective guest that

227

228 Charlotte Bronte at Home

he would find "a strange, uncivilised little
place," and that his entertainment would
be dull, as she had no brother, and her
father was too old to " walk on the moors
with him, or to show him the neighbourT
hood." Nothing daunted, Mr. Taylor came,
found favour in Mr. Bronte's sight, and pro-
ceeded, in a systematic, yet resolute, fashion,
to pay his addresses to Mr. Bronte's daugh-
ter. He had fared but indifferently well in a
twelvemonth, when Charlotte admits to
Ellen that "this little Taylor is deficient
neither in spirit nor sense," after having
assured her that "no matrimonial lot is
even remotely offered me which seems to
me truly desirable. The least allusion to
such a thing is most offensive to Papa."

In this springtime of 1851, just before
Ellen came to Haworth, a passage made
its way into one of Charlotte's letters that
would have encouraged a more timid lover
than the quietly persistent man of business,
had he read it, or suspected the mood in
which it was penned :

"You may laugh as much and as wickedly as you
please ; but the fact is, there is a quiet constancy about
this, my diminutive and red-haired friend, which adds a
foot to his stature, turns his sandy locks dark, and alto-

Mr. Taylor 220

gether dignifies him in my estimation. However, I am
not bothered by much vehement ardour. There is the
nicest distance and respect preserved now, which makes
matters very comfortable."

Perhaps if Mr. Taylor had been a shade
less discreet and cool at this juncture of his
wooing, and had pushed the advantage
gained by his "quiet constancy," the re-
sult would have been different, especially
as Mr. Bronte liked him and enjoyed his
visits. The news that he was about to
quit England for India for an absence of
several years had something to do with the
sincere analysis of his character and the
bias of her estimation in his behalf He
had taken upon himself the selection of the
books sent to Haworth regularly from
Cornhill. The arrival of the box filled by
his thoughtful kindness with food so con-
venient for her mind that she could not
but recognise their intellectual congeniality
was the event of the week in her solitude,
and kept the little man in hourly and grate-
ful remembrance.

In this favourable state of feeling she
prepared for his farewell visit. I think
neither Miss Nussey nor herself would have
been surprised had he taken his leave as an

230 Charlotte Bronte at Home

accepted lover, with a long engagement
ahead of him. Charlotte's account of the
last interview is so characteristic of her sin-
cere, sensitive nature, and so altogether
womanly, that 1 transcribe it, with a smile
of satisfaction :

" Mr. Taylor has been and is gone. Things are just
as they were.

" He looks much thinner and older. I saw him very
near, and once through my glass. The resemblance
to Branwell struck me forcibly. It is marked. He is
not ugly, but very peculiar. The lines in his face show
an inflexibility and, I must add, a hardness of character
which do not attract. As he stood near me ; as he
looked at me in his keen way, it was all I could do to
stand my ground tranquilly and steadily, and not to
recoil as before. It is no use saying anything if I am
not candid. I avow, then, that on this occasion, predis-
posed as 1 was to regard him very favourably, his man-
ner and his personal presence scarcely pleased me more
than at the first interview.

" An absence of five years — a dividing expanse of
three oceans — the wide difference between a man's active
career and a woman's passive existence — these things
are almost equivalent to an eternal separation. But
there is another thing which forms a ban-ier more diffi-
cult to pass than any of these. Would Mr. Taylor and
I ever suit? Could I ever feel for him enough love to
accept him as a husband ? Friendship — gratitude — es-
teem I have, but each moment he came near me, and
that I could see his eyes fastened on me, my veins ran
ice. Now that he is away, I feel far more gently toward

Mr. Taylor 231

him. It is only close by that 1 grow rigid — stiffening
with a strange mixture of apprehension and anger, which
nothing softens but his retreat and a perfect subduing of
his manner."

She understands herself and the cause of
this " repulsion of spheres " more clearly by
the time she writes again :

" I am sure he has estimable and sterling qualities,
but with every disposition, and with every wish, with
every intention, even, to look on him in the most favour-
able point of view at his last visit, it was impossible to
me in my inward heart to think of him as one that
might one day be acceptable as a husband. It would
sound harsh were I to tell even you of the estimate 1
felt compelled to form respecting him.

" Dear Nell ! I looked for something of the gentleman
— something, I mean, of the natural gentleman. You
know 1 can dispense with acquired polish, and for looks,
I know myself too well to think 1 have any right to be
exacting on that point. 1 could not find one gleam —
I could not see one passing glimpse of true good-breed-
ing. It is hard to say, but it is true. In mind too,
'though clever, he is second-rate — thoroughly second-
rate. Were 1 to marry him my heart would bleed in
pain and humiliation. I could not — could not look up
to him !

" No ! if Mr. Taylor be the only husband fate offers to
me, single I must always remain. But yet, at times, 1
grieve for him, and perhaps it is superfluous, for I can-
not think he will suffer much. A hard nature, occupa-
tion, and change of scene will befriend him."*

* Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle, page 3I7.

232 Charlotte Bronte at Home

As if putting away the subject of this
and all other wooings, definitively and with
reason, she closes the frank confidence
with "1 am, dear Nell, your middle-aged
friend."

In still another of this most interesting
series of letters — unpublished until Mr.
Shorter earned our undying gratitude by
giving them publicity — Charlotte expresses
surprise at her father's attitude towards her
admirer. "The least allusion to such a
thing is most offensive to Papa," she had
said in a preceding epistle. Now, she re-
lates that Mr. Bronte had exhorted the pro-
spective traveller to be true to himself, his
country, and God,

' ' and wished him all good wishes.

" Whenever he has alluded to him since, it has been
with significant eulogy. When / hinted that he was no
gentleman, he seemed out of patience with me for the
objection. I believe he thinks a prospective union, de-
ferred for five years, with such a decorous, reliable
personage, would be a very proper and advisable affair."

The two parties to the ill-fated love-
affair never met again. Mr. Taylor resided
in India until his death in 1874, paying
several visits to his native land during this

Mr. Taylor 233

time. In 1863, when Chaiiotte Bronte
had been eight years in her grave, he mar-
ried a widow — it is said, not happily.

Mrs. Gasl<ell pleases us by inserting a
letter so filled with millinery gossip as to
neutralise much she had already said of
Charlotte's indifference to dress. She is
going up to London "in the Season" —
gayer this year than ever before because of
the Great Exposition of 1851 — and is be-
comingly and charmingly " exercised " over
a black lace mantle which looked so rusty
over her new black satin that she exchanged
it for "a white mantle of the same price."
She gives the price {;£i 14s. od.), and
hopes Ellen will not call it "trumpery."
Her heart misgives her that a bonnet bought
in Leeds is "infinitely too gay with its pink
lining." She withstood, on the same day
that she bought the bonnet, some "beauti-
ful silks of pale, sweet colours," and "went
and bought a black silk after all." She
can no more visit Brookroyd before she
goes to London than she can fly, having
quantities of sewing to do, as well as
household matters to arrange. And among
other commissions given to Ellen is one for
"some chemisettes of small size (the full

2 34 Charlotte Bronte at Home

woman's size don't fit me) — both of simple
style, and of good quality for best."

She wore her best raiment a great deal
while in London, attending an assembly of
the "cream of London society" at AI-
mack's, where Thackeray lectured and sin-
gled her out for especial attention before and
after the lecture ; where Lord Carlisle intro-
duced himself to her as "a Yorkshireman,"
and was followed by Monckton Milnes "with
the same plea," and where the "cream of
society " formed into a double row of star-
ing spectators to gape at the " celebrated
authoress " when the lecture was over, and
there was nothing for it but to run the
gauntlet to the door, with as calm a grace
as she could summon at such short notice.

Charlotte sums up her experiences in the
great mart in four lines :

"What now chiefly dwells in my mem-
ory are Mr. Thackeray's lectures. Mademoi-
selle Rachel's acting, D'Aubigne's, Melville's,
and Maurice's preaching, and the Crystal
Palace."

Visits were exchanged between herself
and Mrs. Gaskell ; Mr. Williams continued
to send her all the new books worth read-
ing, and she wrote clear, crisp critiques of

Mr. Taylor 235

these, when she sent them back ; invita-
tions and compliments rained into her lap
with every post ; a visit from her old friend
Miss Wooler refreshed her quondam pupil
"like good wine" ; at the urgent solicita-
tion of her publishers she began Vilhtte,
rated by many reviewers as her strongest
work — and autumn gloomed into the hard
winter of 1851-52. Side by side with talk
of great books she was reading, and the
great book she was writing, is set this
passage :

" Poor old Keeper died last Monday moining, after
being ill one night. He went gently to sleep. We laid
his old faithful head in the garden. There was some-
thing very sad in losing the old dog, yet 1 am glad he
met a natural fate. People kept hinting he ought to be
put away, which neither Papa nor I liked to think of."

The wheels of Villette "drave heavily"
for a while.

" If my health is spared I shall get on with it as fast
as is consistent with its being done, if not well, yet as
well as I can do it. Not one whit faster ! When the
mood leaves me (it has left me now, without vouch-
safing so much as a word or a message when it will
return) 1 put by the MS. and wait till it comes back
again. God knows I sometimes have to wait long — very
long, it seems to me.

2}6 Charlotte Bronte at Home

" However, I can but do my best, and then muffle
my head in the mantle of Patience, and sit down at her
feet and wait."

When the moors were greening under
warm April showers, and something akin
to the glow of health warmed her veins,
she confessed to a part of what she had
endured in those darksome months :

" 1 struggled through the winter, and the early part of
the spring, often with great difficulty. My friend [Ellen
Nussey] stayed with me a few days in the early part of
January ; she could not be spared longer. I was better
during her visit, but had a relapse soon after she left me,
which reduced my strength very much. It cannot be
denied that the solitude of my position fearfully aggra-
vated its other evils. Some long, stormy days and
nights there were, when 1 felt such a craving for support
and companionship as 1 cannot express. Sleepless, 1 lay
awake night after night, weak, and unable to occupy
myself I sat in my chair, day after day, the saddest
memories my only company.

" It was a time I shall never forget ; but God sent it,
and it must have been for the best."

In June, without notifying Ellen of her
intention, Charlotte made a solitary pilgrim-
age to Scarboro', to see for herself whether
or not Anne's last resting-place and tomb-
stone in the graveyard of the Old Church
there were properly cared for. She had

Visit to Anne's Grave 237

given the order to have the memorial slab
erected, and what should be inscribed upon
it, but had never seen it. The record is of
the simplest :

HERE LIE THE REMAINS OF

ANNE BRONTE

DAUGHTER OF THE REV. P. BRONTE

INCUMBENT OF HAWORTH, YORKSHIRE

She Died, Aged 28, May 28th, 1849.

Thus it stands as we see it to-day. Char-
lotte found five errors in the lettering and
had them corrected, besides having the
stone straightened and refaced. Then she
rested for three weeks in the very lodging-
house where Anne had died three years be-
fore, and " was better for her stay." The
sea-air and bathing were a tonic to her
nerves, and memories of Anne were sooth-
ing, not agitating. The surviving sister
"walked on the sands a good deal and
tried not to feel desolate and melancholy."

"How sorely my heart longs for you 1
need not say," she tells Ellen. " 1 am here
utterly alone. Do not be angry. The step

238 Charlotte Bronte at Home

is right. It was a pilgrimage I felt I could
only make alone."

She could not at once resume work upon
Villette.

"The warm weather and a visit to the
sea have done me much good physically ;
but as yet 1 have recovered neither elasticity
of animal spirits nor flow of the power of
composition."

Her father had been a semi-invalid this
summer, but shaking off the splenetic hu-
mours induced by heat and Haworth drain-
age, as cooler weather approached, he took
note of Charlotte's wan face and languid
motions, and insisted that Ellen Nussey be
sent for.

The companionship of the deep-hearted,
sweet-natured woman, whose tactful sym-
pathy was as invariable as her leal affec-
tion, wrought the usual results, although
Charlotte had her for but " one little week."

The first instalment of Villette went up
to London very soon after the gleam of
heart-sunshine was shed into the lonely
places of the great tender heart, faithful
beyond even the faith of woman to the
memory of the beloved dead. In the letter
to Mr. Williams announcing the coming

Another Notable Success 239

of the MS. we get the clue to the miserable
inaction of the winter, the spring, and
early summer.

" 1 can hardly tell you how 1 hunger to hear some
opinion beside my own, and how 1 have sometimes de-
sponded, and almost despaired, because there was no
one to whom to read a line, or of whom to ask a coun-
sel. Jane Eyre was not written under such circum-
stances, nor were two-thirds oi Shirley."

Like the outflashing of a rainbow against
a sombre background of clouds, a sentence
springs into view in a note penned imme-
diately after the publication of her third,
and what bade fair to be her most famous,
book.

"1 got a budget of no less than seven
papers yesterday and to-day. The import
of all the notices is such as to make my
heart swell with gratitude to Him Who
takes note both of suffering, and work and
motives. Papa is pleased, too."

CHAPTER XVII

MR. NICHOLLS — THE MAN AND HIS WOOING

PAPA is pleased, too."
The record bears date of February
15, 1853.

There were other things astir in the Par-
ish and Parsonage of Haworth besides the
pleasing excitement attendant upon the
birth of another successful book — things
anent which the Reverend Patrick Bronte
was not pleased.

In turning back to a letter written by
Charlotte to Ellen Nussey, July 10, 1846,
we read at the fag-end, and not apropos of
the subject-matter of the epistle, a down-
right contradiction of a rumour alluded to by
Ellen to the effect that "iVIiss Bronte might
marry her father's curate." Charlotte adds
to her denial that the only terms on which
she has ever been with Mr. Nicholls is
240

Mr. NichoUs 241

" a cold far-away sort of civility ; moreover, that lie and
his fellow-curates would laugh over the absurdity for six
months, if they were to hear of it ; furthermore, that
they regarded her as an old maid, and that she regarded
them, one and all, as highly uninteresting, narrow, and
unattractive specimens of the coarser sex."

She is quite as tartly uncomplimentary in
October of the next year :

"Mr. Nicholls is not yet returned. 1 am sorry to say
that many of the parishioners express a desire that he
should not trouble himself to recross the Channel. This
is not the feeling that ought to exist between shepherd
and flock. It is not such as poor Mr. Weightman
excited." *

Three years had sensibly modified the
opinion held by the clergyman's daughter
when in the last chapter of Shirley she de-
picted the ' ' unattractive " successor of the
whiskey-loving " Malone " as the model
curate of the county :

"Decent, decorous, and conscientious, he laboured
faithfully in the parish ; the schools, both Sunday- and
day-schools, flourished under his sway like green bay-
trees. Being human, of course he had his faults. These,
however, were proper, steady-going, clerical faults. The
circumstance of finding himself invited to tea with a
dissenter, would unhinge him for a week ; the spectacle
of a Quaker wearing his hat in the church ; the thought

* Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle, page 467.

242 Charlotte Bronte at Home

of an unbaptised fellow-creature being interred with
Christian rites,— these things could make strange havoc
in Mr. Macarthey's physical and mental economy.
Otherwise, he was sane and rational, diligent and
charitable."

Mr. Nicholls roomed in the sexton's
house opposite the churchyard, not a
stone's throw from the Rectory. Charlotte
describes his keen relish of the novel he
would never have read had the author been
a stranger, romances not being in his line :

" JVlr. Nicholls has finished reading Shirley. He is
delighted with it. John Brown's wife seriously thought
he had gone wrong in the head, as she heard him giving
vent to roars of laughter as he sat alone, clapping his
hands and stamping on the floor. He would read all the
scenes about the curates aloud to Papa. He triumphed
in his own character."

Which was not surprising, all things be-
ing considered. It would appear from this
extract that vicar and curate were upon
amicable and social terms up to this date
(1850), and the lively sense of the ridiculous
manifested in the uproar that startled the
sexton's wife is further apparent from a
reference in one of Charlotte's letters to her
father from Filey — near Scarboro', in June,
1852 — to the funny proceedings in a di-

Mr. >Jicholls 241

minutive old church she had attended on
Sunday :

" At one end is a little gallery for the singers, and
when these personages stood up to perform, they all
turned their backs upon the congregation, and the
congregation turned their backs on the pulpit and
parson. Had Mr. Nicholls been there he certainly would
have laughed out." *

She sends kind regards through "dear
Papa " to Mr. Nicholls, Tabby, and Martha,
a classification that implies either disrespect
on the writer's part — an untenable theory
— or a pretty comfortable domestication
of the curate in his superior's household.
Obviously, Mr. Bronte suspected nothing
of what led up to a denouement — and a dis-
agreeable one to him — in the following De-
cember. 1 condense the narrative as given
to Ellen in a long letter from her friend,
enclosing a note from Mr. Nicholls in
answer to one sent by Charlotte after a
conversation with her father.

One Monday evening the curate had
taken tea with the vicar, and Charlotte,
who confesses to having had "dim mis-
givings " of her own for some time, could
not shake off a certain nervous apprehen-

* Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle, page 471 .

244 Charlotte Bronte at Home

sion aroused by "his constant looks and
strange, feverish restraint." Mr. Bronte
had noticed with little sympathy, and much
indirect sarcasm, Mr. Nicholls's " low
spirits, his threats of expatriation, all his
symptoms of impaired health," and it was
not singular that the assistant was not
tempted to tarry in the study after Charlotte
left the two together. Sitting at her sew-
ing in the parlour across the hall, she heard
the exchange of good-nights, and "ex-
pected the clash of the front door." In-
stead of this there was a tap at her door,
and

" like lightning it flashed upon me what was coming.

" Shaking from head to foot, looking deadly pale,
speaking low, vehemently, yet with difficulty, he made
me for the first time feel what it costs a man to declare
affection where he doubts response."

Delicately as the story is told, we feel, in
reading it, that even Ellen would never have
been taken so fully into her correspondent's
confidence but for Charlotte's solemn be-
lief that she was folding down that leaf of
her life forever. She had gone to her
father as soon as her suitor left her, and
"told him what had taken place."

Mr. Bronte's "agitation and anger" threw

Mr. NichoUs 245

him into a state that menaced apoplexy ;
he raved against the unfortunate lover in
terms that would have been unbearable to
his daughter had her affections been en-
gaged. " As it was," she says, "my blood
boiled with a sense of injustice," although
she promised in haste to dismiss her lover
on the morrow with decision that would
preclude the possibility of a recurrence of
the offence.

She was not unreasonable in explaining
her father's outbreak of ungovernable rage
by referring again to his "vehement an-
tipathy to the bare thought of any one
thinking of me as a wife." In her desire
to pacify him, and the "poignant pity in-
spired by Mr. Nicholls's state," it slipped
her memory that he was more than willing
to sanction "the little Taylor's " suit.

When the dust of the onslaught upon
the curate, and, incidentally, upon herself,
lifted, she divined the real cause of the first
scene and others that crowded unpleasantly
soon upon it.

" You must understand that a good share of Papa's
anger arises from the idea (not altogether groundless)
that Mr. NichoUs has behaved with disingenuousness in
so long concealing his aim. 1 am afraid, also, that Papa

246 Charlotte Bronte at Home

thinks a little too much about his want of money. He
says the match would be a degradation; that 1 should be
throwing myself away ; that he expects me, if I marry
at all, to do very differently ; — in short, his manner of
viewing the subject is, on the whole, far fi-om being one
in which I can sympathise. My own objections arise
from a sense of incongruity and uncongeniality in feel-
ings, tastes, principles."

She concludes by wishing "devoutly
that Papa would resume his tranquillity,
and Mr. Nicholls his beef and pudding," —
his landlady reporting an utter lack of
appetite.*

if the irate parent had been, instead, the
secret ally of his curate, he could not have
forwarded his interests more surely than by
the course he was pursuing. Mr. Nicholls
would be allowed to retain his curacy only
upon condition that he would never speak
of " the obnoxious subject " again to father
or daughter. Since he would not agree to
this, his days at Haworth were numbered.
The parish took an active interest in the
matter under fire at the Parsonage, and
sided with the vicar. Like him, the par-
ishioners were proud of their celebrity and
ambitious that she should make a brilliant

* Charlotte' Bronte and Her Circle, page 475.

Mr. Nicholls 247

match, should she ever marry. An old
Haworth resident who saw the wedding,
opened his mind on the subject to me.

" It was not as if she was a common personage, you
see. She was famous ! If you could have seen the
chariots-and-pairs with liveries that used to roll up this
narrow street and stop at that gate ! " — pointing to one
in the wall of the Parsonage garden. " Mr. Bronte pre-
tended to make light of it all, but he had pride in her —
great pride — and he had a right to expect better things
for her than just a country curate — and his own curate
at that. He looked for a rich baronet, at the least, and
he was n't to blame for it."

Mr. Shorter calls our attention to the fact
that Mr. Nicholls, in a spirit of fairness that
does him honour, "always maintained that
Mr. Bronte was perfectly justified in the
attitude he adopted." This judicial and un-
loverly mood was a thing of later growth
than the "temper " which Charlotte regrets
"he showed once or twice in speaking to
Papa" ; the " flaysome looks " directed at
Martha, who was "bitter against him," and
that "dark gloom of his," perceptible to
everybody.

Charlotte had excused his depression and
silent endurance of slights and insults :

" They don't understand the nature of

248 Charlotte Bronte at Home

his feelings, but / see now what they are,"
was a floating straw that augured well for
a change in the current of her thoughts.
" He is one of those who attach themselves
to very few ; whose sensations are close
and deep, like an underground stream, run-
ning strong, but in a narrow channel."

She was never more in sympathy with
her truculent parent than when, three
months subsequent to this regretful ex-
pression, she says, caustically :

" If Mr. Nicholls be a good man at bottom it is a sad
thing tiiat nature has not given him the faculty to put
goodness into a more attractive form. Into the bargain
of all the rest he managed to get up a most pertinacious
and needless dispute with the Inspector, in listening to
which all my old unfavourable impressions revived so
strongly 1 fear my countenance could not but show
them."

Mr. Nicholls secured another curacy, yet
we see him lingering in Haworth in April
of 1853, "sitting drearily in his rooms,"
except when he went out to walk ; reticent
to his brother clergymen ; holding no com-
munication with Mr. Bronte, or with the
members of his family, except that he ad-
mitted to his room "fat little Flossy,"
Charlotte's dog, and took him with him in

Mr. Islicholls 249

his rambles over the hills. His morose
silence and unsocial habits were making
him daily more unpopular.

" How much of this he deserves I can't tell," Char-
lotte writes, perplexedly. " Certainly he never was
agreeable or amiable, and is less so now than ever, and,
alas ! 1 do not know him well enough to be sure that
there is truth and true affection, or only rancour and
corroding disappointment at the bottom of his chagrin.
In this state of things I must be, and 1 am, entirely pas-
sive. 1 may be losing the purest gem, and to me far the
most precious, life can give— genuine attachment — or 1
may be escaping the yoke of a morose temper. In this
doubt conscience will not suffer me to take one step in
opposition to Papa's will, blended as that will is with
the most bitter and unreasonable opposition. So 1 just
leave the matter where we must leave all important
matters."*

The unhappy misunderstanding grew
worse in the next month. Mr. Nicholls's
evident emotion when he administered the
Sacrament for the last time to the people
he had served for seven years, drew tears
from many eyes and elicited from Mr.
Bronte, when it was reported to him, the
sneer, "Unmanly driveller!" When pressed
by the churchwardens to assign a valid
reason for leaving them, he answered that

* Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle, page 479.

250 Charlotte Bronte at Home

Mr. Bronte was not in fault. " If anybody
was wrong, it was himself, and that the
going gave him great pain." Yet, when
Mr. Bronte addressed him, "with con-
strained civility," at a school tea-drinking,
the curate was curt to the verge of rude-
ness, whereat the superior was wroth
exceedingly. "I am afraid both are un-
christian in their mutual feelings ! " sighs
poor Charlotte.

The curate was obliged to call at the Par-
sonage to render into Mr. Bronte's keeping
certain parish papers, and Charlotte, see-
ing him from the window leaning against
the gate on his way out, as if spent in
strength, or ill, went out to speak to him.

" Poor fellow ! " she says. " He wanted such hope
and encouragement as I could not give hi'm. Still, 1
trust he must know now that 1 am not cruelly blind
and indifferent to his constancy and grief. However
— he is gone — gone ! and there is an end of it. "

It was so far from being the end of it
that Mr. NichoUs called at the Parsonage in
January of the next year (1854), being on a
visit to Mr. Grant, a friendly neighbouring
clergyman. Mr. Bronte was stiffly unpleas-
ant, Charlotte so gentle that the call was

Mr. Nicholls 251

repeated, and a correspondence begun be-
tween her and the self-banished suitor. In
March, a note intended for him was slipped,
by mistake, into the same envelope with
one directed to Ellen Nussey, an accident
that led to a full explanation from Char-
lotte. Ellen was invited to meet Mr.
Nicholls at his next visit at Easter. He
would stay with Mr. Grant, "as he had
done two or three times before, but he
would be frequently coming to Haworth."
In April, Charlotte recapitulates the cir-
cumstances of the renewal of intercourse.
They had corresponded, confidentially,
since September of 1853, and the clandes-
tine arrangement weighed so heavily on
the daughter's conscience that "sheer pain "
made her confess all to her father. There
was some " hard and rough work at the
time," but the correspondence was not
forbidden.

" Mr. Nicholls came in January. He was ten days
in the neighbourhood. I saw much of him. I had
stipulated with Papa for opportunity to become better
acquainted." (After eight years of almost daily associa-
tion !) " I had it, and all I learned inclined me to esteem
and affection. Still, Papa was very, very hostile,
bitterly unjust.

252 Charlotte Bronte at Home

" I told Mr. Nicholls the great obstacle that lay in his
way. He has persevered. The result of this, his last
visit is, that Papa's consent is gained, that his respect,
I believe, is won, for IVlr. Nicholls has, in all things,
proved himself disinterested and forbearing. Certainly,
I must respect him, nor can 1 withhold from him more
than mere cool respect. In fact, dear Ellen, 1 am
engaged."*

Mr. Shorter, the first of Charlotte Bronte's
biographers to whom were committed the
materials for the true story of the stormy
courtship detailed in his admirable work, ■
makes short work of the causes that led to
Mr. Bronte's grudging consent to the be-
trothal. I quote the summary:

" Mr. Nicholls's successor did not prove acceptable to
Mr. Bronte. He complained again and again, and one
day Charlotte turned upon her father, and told him
pretty frankly that he was alone to blame — that he had
only to let her marry Mr. Nicholls, with whom she
corresponded and whom she really loved, and all would
be well.

"A little arrangement, the transfer of Mr. Nicholls's
successor to a Bradford church, and Mr. Nicholls left his
curacy at Kirk-Smeaton, and once more returned to
Haworth as an accepted lover."

Charlotte Bronte was now thirty-eight
years of age, a year older than her betrothed,

* Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle, page 485.

Mr. "Nicholls 253

although, on account of her diminutive
stature, small hands and feet, and shy man-
ner, she seemed much younger.

" A tiny, delicate, serious little lady,
pale, with fair, straight hair, and steady
eyes," — ^thus Mrs. Ritchie, Thackeray's
daughter, depicts her, when Charlotte —
in whom the company saw "Jane Eyre —
the great Jane Eyre " — dined with the
Thackerays. She could hardly reach the
elbow the tall host stooped to offer her,
and at table "sat gazing at him with kin-
dling eyes of interest, lighting up with a
sort of illumination every now and then, as
she answered."

The chosen friend of the intellectual Titan,
feted by the nobility and bowed down to
by the commonalty, confessed, by wise
and simple, to be the first novelist of her
day, the greatest woman novelist of any
preceding day — she had, deliberately, and in
defiance of opposition from the father she
almost worshipped, engaged to marry
Arthur Bell Nicholls, a poor curate whose
reputation had never gone beyond the
hills that girdled the Haworth valleys. We
may well ponder, word by word, what she
tells her only confidante of her own feel-

2=i4 Charlotte Bronte at Home

ings now that the momentous step was
taken.

" For myself, dear Ellen, while thankful to One Who
seems to have guided me through much difficulty,
much and deep distress and perplexity of mind, I am
still very calm, very inexpectant. What 1 taste of
happiness is of the soberest order. 1 trust to love my
husband. 1 am grateful for his tender love to me. 1
believe him to be an affectionate, a conscientious, a high-
principled man ; and if, with all this, 1 should yield to
regrets that fine talents, congenial tastes and thoughts
are not added, it seems to me 1 should be most presump-
tuous and thankless.

" There is a strange, half-sad feeling in making these
announcements. The whole thing is something other
than imagination paints it beforehand ; cares — fears —
come mixed inextricably with hopes."*

As a postscript to this most interesting
letter one of her own maxims might be
appended:

"i believe it is better to marry to love,
than to marry for love."

What manner of man was he who dared
woo a woman of genius, with a soul of
fire, and endowed with the divine gift of
firing and illumining other souls, the world
over? We ask ourselves the question
wonderingly, even after reading what Char-
* Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle, page 486.

Mr. Nicholls 2S5

lotte says of his courage, constancy, and
heroic devotion to duty; and even when
we have perused Mr. Shorter's eloquent
tribute to his valued friend:

"It is not difficult to understand that Charlotte
Bronte had loved him and had fought down parental
opposition in his behalf. The qualities of gentleness,
sincerity, unaffected piety, and delicacy of mind are
his ; and he is beautifully Jealous, not only for the fair
fame of Currer Bell, but — what she would, equally have
loved — for her father, who also has had much undue
detraction in the years that are past."

In pursuance of my purpose of looking
up and cross-examining authorities that
have not been made crafty by many inter-
viewers, I went out of my way, upon one
of my visits to Haworth, to talk with a
man of the people who had been in the
parish day-school in Mr. Nicholls's day, —
when, as Charlotte says of Mr. Macarthey,
"the schools flourished like green bay-
trees." My Yorkshireman, beguiled into
talkativeness by suggestions, when he
would have drawn into his shell if plied
with direct interrogations, gave me a por-
trait that was like a charcoal-sketch in
breadth and distinctness :

" I wor in th' school before and after he married th'

2^6 Charlotte Bronte at Home

owd Parson's daughter. He wor not, so to speak, a
tall man, but of fair height, mebbe five-foot-ten, 1
should say, an' stocky-like. Broad shoulders, an' a
broad face. Sometimes he wore his beard full ; some-
times he 'd only whiskers. A master-hand he wor for
fresh air. He cut round holes in th' panels of the door
of his room at the sexton's where he lodged. Said he
could na' get his breath without them. As well as if
1 'd seen him yesterday, 1 moind how he 'd walk in the
field back o' the Parsonage every morning after break-
fast, rushing up an' down, swinging his arms, an', of a
frosty day, beating them across his chest ; an' when he 'd
kep' this up for half-an-hour or so, an' got himself into
a glow, he 'd come tearing down the street and into the
schoolroom, where there was only a wee bit of a stove
to warm us in the dead of winter, and throw open ivery
winder to let in 'real, live air,' he 'd say, pantin' for
breath all the time. An' " — laughing and shrugging
his burly shoulders in the recollection — " we, poor wee
devils, all blue and fair stairrved wi' th' cold ! He wor
niver so friendly in the parish as Mr. Bronte. It wor all
work, an' no play, when Mr. Nicholls wor about. Na!
not cross, but harrd like, an' speaking short an' quick."

From other sources, among them Char-
lotte's admissions, before his indomitable
devotion and her father's injustice moved
her to pity, and pity to " esteem and
affection " — we gain the same idea of a
lack of personal magnetism in the man she
married. How far physical robustness and
muscular energy app'ealed to one always

REV. ARTHUR BELL NICHOLLS

FROM A DRAWING BY MISS E. TAYLOR

Mr. Nicholls 257

fragile, and seldom really well, we may
suspect, but cannot determine. She was
pitiably lonely. Fame had brought her
hosts of acquaintances and a few true
friends, without enriching home loves or
supplying domestic companionship. She
loved her father almost with passion, in
the absence of anybody else to love. She
was never intimate with him at any time,
and with advancing years his liking for
solitude, when once within the Parsonage
walls, increased. Oftener than otherwise,
his only child took her meals alone in the
parlour, haunted for her by a host of tortur-
ing memories. In the evening she sat,
solitary, there, unless when Ellen Nussey
was her guest.

An argument which certainly had great
weight with the dutiful daughter was Mr.
Nicholls's voluntary pledge (kept religiously
until Mr. Bronte's death in 1861) that he
would be "support and consolation to her
father's declining years." Her letters show
how poignant was her alarm at any and
every illness that attacked the old man, and
how abject the sense of her helplessness
when these were likely to be serious. A
sentence in one of the half-dozen letters

2^8 Charlotte Bronte at Home

written after her marriage is pregnant with
meaning, taken in this connection:

"Each time I see Mr. Nicholls put on
gown or surplice, I feel comforted to think
that this marriage has secured Papa good
aid in his old age."

If we wish, in reading it, that a mistress
of nervous, pertinent English had used
some other word than "comforted," we
take refuge in Mr. Shorter's assertion —
and no more trustworthy evidence could
be adduced — "that the months of her mar-
ried life, prior to her last illness, were the
happiest she was destined to know."

CHAPTER XVIII

MARRIAGE MARRIED LIFE — ILLNESS AND DEATH

CHARLOTTE BRONTE'S trousseau
was bought at Leeds." The sen-
tence recurs to the memory of each mem-
ber of the " Bronte Cult," in passing through
the busy, unromantic city. She planned
what gowns she should buy, and how they
should be fashioned, in the course of a three
days' visit to Mrs. Gaskell in May. The
wedding was to take place June 29. She
consulted her hostess, also, as to certain
inexpensive alterations to be made in the
Parsonage.

A small room back of the parlour, used,
heretofore, for domestic stores — flour, coals,
etc., — was paved with coarse flagstones;
the walls were rough-cast. Charlotte would
have a board floor laid upon the cold stones,
although, if this were done, there would be

259

260 Charlotte Bronte at Home

an awkward step up from the hall. Mr.
Nicholls's one besetting physical ailment
was a rheumatic tendency, and no carpet
Charlotte could afford to buy, or that would
be congruous with the other appointments
of the Parsonage, would prevent the chill
of the flags from striking through to his
feet. The new boards were to be covered
with a green-and-white ingrain of good
quality; the walls would be hung with a
green-and-white paper, and the one window
with curtains to match.

The two distinguished women had more
to say of domestic economies and decora-
tion in those three days than of books, and
publishers, and fame. Holy Nature is justi-
fied of her children when these are women.

The bride-expectant wrote complacently
to her friend, on her return to Haworth, of
the "little new room." The green-and-
white curtains were up ; they exactly suited
the papering, and "looked clean and neat
enough." To Ellen she fears that dear
old Miss Wooler, one of the few persons to
be invited to the wedding, may think her
former pupil negligent because she had not
written sooner.

" 1 am only busy and bothered. I want

Marriage 261

to clear up my needlework a little, and
have been sewing against time since I was
at Brookroyd. Mr. Nicholls hindered me a
full week."

Which naive statement "comforts" us
in no small measure, as being more like
"lovering" talk than anything else she has
said.

Miss Wooler and Ellen Nussey arrived
quietly at the Parsonage on the 28th of
June. After the three friends had had tea,
and discussed in full the arrangements for
the morrow, they sat long together in the
purple twilight, talking tenderly of the past,
hopefully of the future, Mr. Bronte remain-
ing, as was his custom, in the study. Not
until Charlotte went in to bid him "Good-
night" did he inform her that he did not
intend to be present at the marriage. He
would stay at home while the ceremony
was performed. Remonstrance and peti-
tion were in vain. He was calmly stub-
born in his refusal, and the dismayed trio,
retreating to the parlour, consulted the Ru-
bric for a possible way out of the dilemma.
The injunction that the bride shall be re-
ceived by the officiating clergyman "from
her father's or friend's hand " furnished

262 Charlotte Bronte at Home

an expedient. Miss Wooler would give
away the daughter whose natural guardian
had deserted her at the eleventh hour.

Mrs. Newsome (Sarah De Garrs) puts in
a plea for Mr. Bronte's conduct on this
occasion, which it is but fair to read :

" 1 think I understand his absenting himself from the
church. There are many of us who feel heart-break at
the marriage of ' our own,' even 'though all seems well.
In his case it was pathetic. The Brontes had been a
family where a joy must be shared by each member, or
lose its flavour. The father would seem to see each dear
absent face as they individually presented themselves to
his mind's eye, and he could not trust himself Char-
lotte understood her father, while Miss Wooler could
only see the proprieties."

Whatever weight may be attached to the
apology, it is creditable to the framer's
heart, and may temper our indignation in
the thought of the little band of three
women who next morning slipped silently
out of the gate opening into the side-street,
and walked the tifty yards or so lying be-
tween gate and church-porch. Mr. Nicholls,
the clerk, and the clergyman awaited them
there. The ceremony, brief as it was,
gave time for the circulation of the astound-
ing news that "Miss Bronte, dressed like a

Marriage 263

bride," had gone into the church with Mr.
Nicholls. When the party emerged from
the lobby, the steps were filled by open-
eyed spectators. Among them were three
people who told me of the scene.

The bridal dress was of worked muslin ;
a pretty lace mantle was worn over it.
The pure white "chip" bonnet had a
wreath of green ivy-leaves about the crown.
Mrs. Gaskell compares the wearer to a
"snowdrop." Those who saw her say
that she looked absurdly small and young —
"quite like a little girl just from her first
communion."

The wedding-breakfast was served and
waited upon by Martha Brown, and she
helped the bride change the white muslin
for the travelling dress. We saw this in
the Bronte Museum at Haworth, — a glace
silk, of a warm dove colour, with a narrow
white stripe in it, and trimmed with a sort
of brocaded galloon. Her bonnet was of
"drawn " or "shirred " silk ; her shawl —
also preserved in the Museum — is in colour
between drab and grey, all wool and soft
in texture. This was her Sunday costume
for the rest of that season, except when
she varied it by substituting for the woollen

264 Charlotte Bronte at Home

shawl one of white taffeta — also on exhi-
bition among the Bronte relics.

The collection, 1 may mention here, com-
prises other mementos infinitely touching
to the tender-hearted visitor as indicative
of the frugal simplicity of a life that ran
parallel with the brilliant literary career,
without being deflected by a hair's breadth
from its even tenor, or catching more than
fleeting glints of light from it. Besides the
execrable portraits executed by the artist
brother, there are pencil-sketches wrought
with painstaking minuteness by Charlotte
when she, too, dreamed of expressing her
genius with brush and crayon. Criticism
is disarmed by the recollection. Samplers,
worked by the mother and each of her
daughters ; the MS. of The Professor, al-
most unreadable to the naked eye, but
clear as copperplate under a glass; Char-
lotte's expense-books, in even smaller
script, yet perfect in every letter and fig-
ure ; Keeper's collar — perhaps the same in
which Emily knotted her strong fingers in
dragging him down the stairs; a brooch,
enclosing a lock of Charlotte's soft brown
hair; a jet necklace which was one of her
scanty store of ornaments; collar and cuffs,

Marriage 265

home-made, of Brussels net and lace, that
were hers; a fragment of the black-and-
white print gown she gave to Martha
Brown to wear to the wedding, and a
pink print figured with white — a house-
gown of her own, made by herself as a
part of her trousseau — each has a tale to
tell, and all are of Charlotte Bronte at Home
— not of the eminent novelist.

Currer Bell lives for us no longer when
the wheels of the carriage — with white
"favours" at the horses' ears, and the
same upon the coachman's breast — rumble
down the long steep street. Henceforth,
it is Mr. NichoUs's wife whom we see —
the "Charlotte " known and tenderly cher-
ished by, at most, four or five people of
the hundreds who had met and talked with
her.

This Charlotte it was who dispatched a
short note to Ellen from Conway, the first
stage of the wedding-journey. It had been
"pleasant enough thus far "; the evening
was "wet and wild, 'though the day was
fair chiefly, with some gleams of sunshine."
Ellen must let her know by return mail
"how she and Miss Wooler got home.

"On Monday, I think, we cross the

266 Charlotte Bronte at Home

Channel." Her husband was Scotch by
parentage, but Irish by birth, and the vaca-
tion was spent in Ireland.

The bride "liked her new relations."
"My dear husband, too, appears in a new
light in his own counti^y " — is a pleasing
paragraph in a home letter.

" More than once I have had deep pleasure in hearing
his praises on all sides. Some of the old servants and
followers of the family tell me 1 am a most fortunate
person, for that I have got one of the best gentlemen in
the country. I trust I feel thankful to God for having
enabled me to make what seems a right choice, and 1
pray to be enabled to repay, as 1 ought, the affectionate
devotion of a truthful, honourable man."

The same note is sounded in a communi-
cation to Ellen Nussey, shortly after they
were resettled at Haworth. At a school
tea-drini<ing, celebrating the home-coming
of the wedded pair, a parishioner proposed
Mr. Nicholls's health as a "consistent Christ-
ian and a kind gentleman." Tame praise
this in our ears, considering the occasion,
yet the newly wedded wife was "deeply
touched by the thought that to merit and
win such a character was better than to
earn either wealth, or fame, or power. 1

Married Life 267

am disposed to echo that high, but simple
eulogium."

In a graver vein — not free from sadness
— she imparts to her friend some views she
has adopted in the month and a half that
divide her from the wedding-day :

" Dear Nell ! during the last six weeks the colour of
my thoughts is a good deal changed. I know more of
the realities of life than I once did. 1 think many false
ideas are propagated, perhaps unintentionally. 1 think
those married women who indiscriminately urge their
acquaintance to marry, much to blame. For my part, I
can only say with deeper sincerity and fuller significance
what 1 always said in theory, — 'Wait God's will.'
Indeed, indeed, Nell, it is a solemn and strange and
perilous thing for a woman to become a wife. Man's
lot is far, far different." *

The invitation to pay her a visit at the
earliest opportunity, urged in this letter, is
reiterated in another written in September.
Charlotte grudged the splendid weather
when her friend did not come on the ap-
pointed day. "The moors are in glory. 1
never saw them fuller of purple bloom."
(As she was never to see them again ! )

Mr. Nicholls flourishes in health, "hav-
ing gained twelve pounds in Ireland."
* Cluirlotlc Broiilc and Her Circle, page 493,

268 Charlotte Bronte at Home

Then, "Arthur" slips from the tip of the
pen, and the lapse is prettily apologised
for : "It has grown natural to me to use it
now."

Ellen must get away from an invasion
of visitors at Brookroyd, and come to
Haworth, where she was impatiently ex-
pected — a petition granted in October.

In November — "Arthur wishes you
would burn my letters. It is not 'old
friends ' he mistrusts, he says, but the
chances of war — the accidental passing of
letters into hands and under eyes for which
they were not written."

She and Arthur contemplate a visit to
Brookroyd, and it is again alluded to as a
probability later in the month. Sir James
Kay Shuttleworth and a friend have been
guests at the Parsonage from Saturday un-
til after dinner on Monday, and the mistress
of the manse has been kept very busy with
her guests.

An oft-postponed meeting of the two
friends was again deferred by Arthur's
dread lest his wife should contract a fever
then prevalent in the Brookroyd neighbour-
hood. Arthur, it is evident, had taken all
her business into his capable hands. She

Married Life 26Q

quotes him three times in a note of four-
teen lines, and begins one dated December
7, 1854, with the half-regretful, half-
jesting —

' ' I shall not get leave to go to Brookroyd before
Christmas, now, so do not expect me. Arthur is sony
to disappoint both you and me, but it is his fixed wish
that a few weeks should be allowed yet to elapse before
we meet. Probably he is confirmed in this desire by
my having a cold at present. 1 did not achieve the walk
to the waterfall with impunity. Though 1 changed my
wet things immediately on returning home, yet 1 felt a
chill afterwards, and the same night had sore throat and
cold ; however, 1 am better now, but not quite well.

" Did I tell you that our poor little Flossy is dead?
He drooped for a single day and died quietly in the night
without pain.''

She can hardly understand why she is
busier than ever before, "but the fact is,
whenever Arthur is in I must have occupa-
tions in which he can share, or which will
not, at least, divert my attention from him."

Her Christmas letter to Brookroyd in-
cludes Arthur's holiday greetings with hers.
" He is well, thank God ! and so am I, and
he is 'my dear boy,' — certainly dearer
now than he was six months ago. In three
days we shall actually have been married
that length of time ! "

270 Charlotte Bronte at Home

The wedded pair visited the Kay-Shuttle-
worths in January, and our hearts, quite
melted by the spontaneity of the "dear
boy " phrase, stiffen and cool when January
19 comes, and excuses are still made for
their non-appearance at Brookroyd. The
wife " hopes to write with certainty and
fix Wednesday, the 31st of January as the
day, but "

The "but" is to us a black cloud settling
down between those who had loved so
faithfully through so many and such
chequered years. Charlotte's own health
is now the obstacle to going anywhere.
She hints at a possible and natural cause for
the "indigestion and continual faint sick-
ness " that have been her portion for ten
days. Her friend must keep the matter
wholly to herself while it is so uncertain.

"1 am rather mortified to lose my good
looks as I am doing just when I thought of
going to Brookroyd."*

The November excursion to the "Bronte
waterfall" was "dear Arthur's" idea.
Charlotte was just sitting down to her desk
to write a letter when he summoned her to
a walk. They had tramped half a mile
* Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle, page 499.

Threatened Illness 271

before he suggested the waterfall. It would
be swollen by melting snows and worth
seeing. Of course Charlotte instantly re-
minded herself how often she had " wished
to see it in its winter power," and the
tramp was extended over two miles farther.
While they were watching the "torrent
racing over the rocks, white and beautiful,"
it began to rain, and they "walked home
under a streaming sky.

"However, 1 enjoyed the walk inex-
pressibly, and would not have missed the
spectacle on any account."

As we have seen, the loyal, valiant little
wife took a heavy cold, attended by a sore
throat and cough that wore upon her
strength. While at Gawthorpe, the seat of
the Kay-Shuttleworths, she added to her
cold by another long walk. The ground
was wet and cold, and we are amazed at
learning that her own prudence and Arthur's
zealous care of her health did not prevent
her from wearing thin shoes on the expe-
dition. Sore throat and cough were abated
somewhat, but not entirely gone, nor had
she recovered the strength they had wasted,
when the "perpetual nausea and ever-re-
curring faintness" — pronounced to be hope-

272 Charlotte Bronte at Home

fully symptomatic by the medical man
whom Mr. Nicholls summoned — overtook
her. She had been confined to her bed for
some weeks — too weak and exhausted to
keep her feet any longer even to wait upon
her husband — when the first of two pen-
cilled notes was sent to Ellen Nussey :

" I must write one line out of my dreary bed. 1 am
not going to talk of my sufferings. It would be useless
and painful. 1 want to give you an assurance which I
know will comfort you — and that is, 1 find in my hus-
band the tenderest nurse, the kindest support, the best
earthly comfort that ever woman had. His patience
never fails, and it is tried by sad days and broken nights.
Papa — thank God ! is better. Our poor old Tabby is
dead and buried!"

Tabby had died suddenly, and although
her great age and often infirmities had made
her more of a care than a help for several
years past, her death was a shock and a
sorrow to the one survivor of the four
children she had tended with motherly de-
votion. Martha Brown was Charlotte's ef-
ficient nurse. Mrs. Gaskell recounts how she
tried from time to time to cheer her with
the thought of the baby that was coming.
" 1 daresay 1 shall be glad sometime," she
would say. "But I am so ill ! so weary ! "

Illness 273

She put her hand — now so wasted that
the light struck through it when she lifted
it — to paper about the middle of February,
1855. The letter was to the Miss Wheel-
wright who had been her schoolmate in
Brussels :

" A few lines of acknowledgment your letter shall
have, whether well or ill. At present I am confined to
my bed with illness, and have been for three weeks. Up
to this period since my marriage I have had excellent
health. My husband and 1 live at home with my father.
Of course I could not leave him. He is pretty well,
better than last summer.

" No kinder, better husband than mine, it seems to
me, there can be in the world. I do not want now for
kind companionship in health, and the tenderest nursing
in sickness.

" Deeply I sympathise in all you tell me about Dr.
W. and your excellent mother's anxiety. 1 trust he will
not risk another operation. I cannot write more now ;
for 1 am reduced and weak. God bless you all !
' ' Yours affectionately,

"C. B. NiCHOLLS."

The unfailing courtesy and kindly con-
sideration for others' welfare that had
proved her a thoroughbred in health were
with her still; her filial piety and unselfish
fealty to her husband were strong in
death, as in life. For the two in whom

274 Charlotte Bronte at Home

her constant soul was bound up she strug-
gled with death hourly at closer quarters.

Mr. Shorter has rounded off her corre-
spondence as it should be, if there be any
truth in "the eternal fitness of things,"
with the hitherto unpublished last letter
Charlotte Bronte wrote, — and it was to
Ellen Nussey :

"Thank you very much for Mrs. Hewitt's sensible,
clear letter. Thank her, too. In much her case was
wonderfully like mine, but I am reduced to greater weak-
ness. The skeleton emaciation is the same. 1 cannot
talk. Even to my dear, patient, constant Arthur, 1 can
say but few words at once.

" These last two days I have been somewhat better,
and have taken some beef-tea, a spoonful of wirie-and-
water, and a mouthful of pudding at different times.

" Dear Ellen ! I realise full well what you have gone
through, and will have to go through with poor Mercy "
(Ellen's sister). " Oh, may you continue to be supported
and not sink. Sickness here has been terribly rife.
Kindest regards to Mr. and Mrs. Clapham, your mother,
— Mercy. Write when you can.

" Yours,

"C. B. NiCHOLLS."

"The relentless nausea and faintness,
still borne in patient trust," never relaxed
their hold until the end was sure. February
had gone, and half of March, when the

Death 27"^

fluttering pulse quickened with fever; her
mind wandered; she was thirsty and faint.
Could something be given to make her
stronger? Beef-tea, brandy, milk, were
tried in turn. The stomach could retain
nothing. She sank steadily, sleeping most
of the time, from utter exhaustion, and
speaking but once in her last night on earth.

Her husband, kneeling by her bedside,
and praying for the precious passing life,
saw the beautiful eyes open upon his.
They were full of wistful love, the lips
were parted in a whisper :

" I am not going to die — am I ? He will
not separate us ! We have been so happy ! "

She drew her last breath early on the
morning of March 31, 1855.

A testimonial to Charlotte Bronte, ex-
quisite in diction and full of feeling, was
written by Mr. Thackeray for the Cornhill
Magazine in April, i860. It accompanied
two chapters — all that were penned — of the
last story ever begun by the author of Jafie
Eyre. The unfinished tale is headed Emma.
Nothing she ever wrote surpasses the frag-
ment in crispness and pathos. The heroine
is a lonely child, supposed for a while to
be an heiress, discovered in the second

276 Charlotte Bronte at Home

chapter to be deserted, penniless, friend-
less — the victim of a cruel impostor.

Mr. Thackeray throws open the door of
the Parsonage parlour for us, to reveal a
tableau for which we must ever bless him.
It is a home idyl, at the sight of which a
distrustful, resentful pain we have tried to
ignore, even to ourselves, leaves our hearts.
A new and softer light plays over the fig-
ures of the husband and wife. We can
thank God, with her, that loneliness and
lack of sympathy are things of the past.
She had acknowledged to Ellen that
"Arthur's" bent was wholly towards mat-
ters of life and active usefulness, " little in-
clined to the literary and contemplative."
He was, nevertheless, an interested listener,
a cordial sympathiser, and a gentle critic of
her work.

This is Mr. Thackeray's sketch :

" One evening, at the close of 1854, as Charlotte
NichoIIs sat with her husband by the fire, listening to
the howling of the wind about the house, she suddenly
said to her husband, ' If you had not been with me, I
must have been writing now ! '

"She then ran up-stairs, and brought down and read
aloud the beginning of a new tale. When she had fin-
ished, her husband remarked, ' The critics will accuse
you of repetition.'

Death 277

" She replied, ' Oh ! I shall alter that. 1 always be-
gin two or three times before I can please myself. '

" But it was not to be. The trembling little hand was
to write no more. The heart, newly awakened to love
and happiness, and throbbing with maternal hope, was
soon to cease to beat ; that intrepid outspeaker and
champion of truth, that eager, impetuous redresser of
wrong, was to be called out of the world's fight and
struggle."

Charlotte Nicholls made her will February
17th, two days after she wrote to Miss
Wheelwright. Although " much reduced
and very weak," her mind was perfectly
clear, and we have no reason to think that
she then doubted her final recovery. As a
proof that she did not, a clause bequeaths
to her husband the interest of her property
during his lifetime — ' ' in case 1 leave issue " ;
in which event the principal was to revert
to her "child or children." Should she die
without issue, everything was left unre-
servedly to him. He was sole executor.
Her father and Martha Brown were the
witnesses. Mr. Nicholls took out letters of
administration April 18, 1855.

For six years he remained an inmate of
Haworth Parsonage, Mr. Bronte's assistant
in church and parish, his affectionate son
at home. Regarding his wife's father as a

278 Charlotte Bronte at Home

sacred trust from her, he fulfilled it will-
ingly, patiently, even tenderly — until the
old man fell asleep after a tedious illness,
June 7, 1861, aged eighty-four years.

Mr. NichoUs then returned to Ireland,
where he still lives, beloved and respected
by a large circle of friends, held by his im-
mediate relatives to be "the best of men."
After his removal to his native land he mar-
ried a second time. His wife was Miss
Bell, a cousin ; and Mr. Shorter gives us the
assurance that the union " has been one of
unmixed blessedness."

CHAPTER XIX

THE HA WORTH OF TO-DAY

FORTY-ONE years after the great novel-
ist and true woman had laid down
the insupportable burden of mortality, 1
went on my first visit to Haworth.

In many perusals of works that are to
me still miracles of creative genius, when
I recall the peculiarly secluded life of the
writer and the circumstances under which
they were produced, Charlotte Bronte had
come closer to my heart than many of my
living friends. The most commonplace
description of her appearance or habits, the
most meagre detail of her personal history
had fascination for me that did not abate as
mature years brought disillusion to many
other dreams. My approach to the scenes
among which she had lived, laboured, suf-
fered, and died, was as to a shrine.
279

28o Charlotte Bronte at Home

The Haworth railway station is situated
between the new factory village of that
name, built upon the hill to the traveller's
left as he alights from the London train,
and upon steeper hills on the right. Over
and between these last twists a foot-path,
passing two or three black stone cot-
tages and farm-ibuildings, and bringing up
abruptly at what is surely the steepest
street ever laid out by a sane surveyor. It
is paved with flat stones set edgewise, to
afford hoofs a possible "purchase" ; shops
and cottages, all built of the blackened
stone one sees everywhere here, and
roofed with slates, line the way to the top
of the hill, where stand the rectory and the
church. At the very gate of the latter is
the ancient hostelry, the Black Bull. The
landlord, whose father and grandfather
kept it before him, apologises for the
"new" and modern front, which is but
fifty-odd years old. The staircase of solid
stone is worn into deep ruts by the tread
of a dozen generations of long-lived York-
shire folk.

By the time we had taken possession of
the comfortable bedrooms and parlour as-
signed to us, and ordered ' ' a genuine York-

The Haworth of To-day 281

shire tea," twilight was settling upon the
valleys; but we sallied forth, impatient for
a first glimpse of the Parsonage. The wing,
added to it under circumstances of which
1 shall speak presently, leaves the original
building intact as to exterior. We knew
it at a glance, from the many pictures as
familiar to us as any scenes in our own
country. It is an oblong stone house of
two stories, with two windows on each
side of the front door, and a row of five
windows above, with a chimney topped
with tiles, or " pots," at each end. A stone
pediment projects over the door, besides
which there is nothing to relieve the bare
ugliness of the frontage. The churchyard
slopes away from it down to the church
and village. At the beholder's left it also
slopes directly down to the gable, in which
is set a solitary window, and shuddering
conjectures as to drainage and water-supply
force themselves upon the least practi-
cal. The burial-ground is literally paved
with weather-and-smoke-blackened tomb-
stones. There is not so much as a foot-
path between them.

" The back part of the house is extremely
ancient," says Charlotte in Shirley. " It is

282 Charlotte Bronte at Home

said that the out-kitchens there were once
enclosed in the churchyard, and there are
graves under them."

The family at the Parsonage had no
neighbours of their own rank. On the
farther hills are the residences of prosper-
ous mill-owners and country gentry, but
the Brontes had no means of reaching
them except on foot. No carriage of any
kind was to be had in Haworth.

Within this cramping shell of circum-
stances, contracted sometimes with the
rigour of the thumb-screw, glowed and
throbbed genius that compelled the admira-
tion of all English-reading peoples. The
lives these girls led in and for and of them-
selves were as far removed from, and as
unlike, the world of their actual environ-
ment as the tropics from the arctic pole.

Leaning against the square tower which
is all that remains of the old church, while
the night mists gradually blotted out the
grim outlines of the rectory, we spoke
musingly of these things, and marvelled the
more in silence.

Whence did the sisters draw their in-
spiration ? Where in experiences, confined
almost entirely to the wild Yorkshire parish

The Haworth of To-day 283

and the dull routine of a Brussels boarding-
school, did they find even the suggestions
of Rochester, and Blanche Ingram, of Rob-
ert Moore and Catherine Linton, of Mr.
Sympson and Dr. John ? What in these
waste lands kept alive the holy fires of im-
agination, and nourished fancy, and held
back from despair natures so dissimilar to
those of their daily associates that the very
tongue in which they wrote and spoke was
like a foreign language ?

A slow rain drove us by-and-by to the
shelter of our inn. Our evening meal, ex-
cellent in quality and abundant to profusion,
was served in a parlour adorned with pho-
tographs of the old church and rectory,
and warmed by the dancing flames of a
soft-coal fire. A window of my bedroom
looked upon the churchyard; the rear wall
of the church was not twenty feet away.

The rising wind, blowing down from
the moors, drove the rain in intermittent
streams against the parlour windows, as
we mused before the fire and dipped into
Jane Eyre, Shirley, and Villette to steep our
souls yet more thoroughly in "local col-
our." The scrape and tramp of hobnailed
shoes upon the stone floor of the pass-

284 Charlotte Bronte at Home

age without our door helped the illusion
that set dates at naught. The tap-room
company was assembling for a Saturday
evening sitting and smoking and decent
quaffing of the famous Black Bull brew.
It was easy to imagine that "th' Parson's
son" would presently be sent for; impos-
sible not to strain our ears to catch the
sound of his quick run down the steep
street, his bound through the paved entry,
the roar of applause that welcomed him.
Those of our party who visited the tap-
room brought back more tales of him — the
village demigod and the family disgrace —
than of father or sisters.

Sunday morning dawned brilliantly clear.
As soon as breakfast was dispatched, we
set out for a stroll over the moors — Emily's
even more than Charlotte's moors, although
the foot-path, gained by a turnstile at the
side of the rectory wall, leading through
several fields to the wide commons, and
over them to the "Bronte" waterfall,
bears the name of "Charlotte Bronte's
favourite walk."

The sweep of the air over the hills bil-
lowing against the horizon on every side
of us was the elixir of life. Look where

The Haworth of To-day 285

we might, we saw hills! hills! hills! — blue
in the hollows, black in the gorges, green
upon brow and sides with the short, thick
turf that grows nowhere else as in this sea-
girt, fog-draped island, and criss-crossed
by the stone walls separating one freehold
from another. Cattle were grazing in these
fields; upon hillsides and hilltops we could
discern here a cottage, there a spacious
farmstead, and we counted four church-
towers within a radius of perhaps twenty
miles; but the region is sparsely settled
outside of the mill towns, and except in
the ravines there are so few trees that the
effect of generous spaces in summer and
of bleak nakedness in winter can never be
absent from the view.

In the springtime the miles of moorland
are dappled green; "some of the fields are
pearled with daisies, and some golden with
king-cups " ; in August the meads take on
a deeper green, and the moors are royal in
purple raiment. Mrs. Gaskell describes
them, when the bloom had been beaten off
by a thunder-storm, as of a "livid brown."
When we saw them, the heather, darkened
by frost, was almost black when crossed
by a cloud; the slopes of wild grass were

286 Charlotte Bronte at Home

bleached to a pallid yellow. To the listen-
ers upon the serene heights that glorious
Sunday morning, with only a world of
purest air betwixt them and heaven, were
wafted across the valley notes of one
church-bell after another, until the ether
was vibrant with celestial melody.

Flocks of low-flying swallows skimmed
the pale grasses, and hardy robins ran fear-
lessly before us as we descended. We
saw but one human creature besides our-
selves in a walk of an hour and a half.

Before entering upon a description of
Haworth church and rectory, 1 feel con-
strained by a sense of justice to correct, so
far as is in my power, the popular preju-
dice with regard to the changes made in
both of these buildings since the death of
Mr. Bronte left the living vacant. The
duty to set down as briefly as is consistent
with accuracy the history of these altera-
tions is the more binding upon my con-
science because I had, prior to my visit to
Haworth, joined in the strictures passed
upon what, to the distant admirers of
the matchless sisters, was little short of
sacrilege.

At the time of Mr. Bronte's decease the

The Haworth of To-day 287

Parsonage was well-nigh uninhabitable, the
church almost a ruin. Haworth was
scourged periodically by low and typhoid
fevers, and at length an official analysis of
the drinking-water of the village revealed
truths so revolting that the authorities in
charge of public affairs insisted upon bring-
ing in a purer and more abundant supply
from a distance. Mr. Bronte refused to
have it introduced into the Parsonage.
The well in the yard, from which he and
his children had drunk for almost twoscore
years, was good enough for him.

The Parsonage was ill-ventilated, damp,
and cold ; the windows were few and small,
having been put in when the tax upon glass
burdened householders.

Poverty, seclusion, drudgery, climatic
severity, and repeated bereavements would
have tamed the young eagles into the meek-
est of barn-yard fowls had the genius that
animated them been less than miraculous
in fervour and might. They had meat that
their associates knew not of.

Outside of the Parsonage the Mwsanitary
conditions were yet more appalling. The
churchyard teemed with the dead, and
fresh interments were made almost daily.

288 Charlotte Bronte at Home

" Family graves," unknown in America
except among the foreign population, were
filled to within a few inches of the surface.
The tiny dooryard separating the Parson-
age from the cemetery was lower than the
swollen level on the other side of the fence,
and when the wind blew over the burial-
ground into the front windows it brought
pestilential gases into sleeping- and living-
rooms.

The church stood farther down the slope,
and in wet weather foul pools oozed up
between the stone slabs of the floor. This
lay by now over a foot below the graves
pressing upon the outer walls. The deep
digging of the "family grave" had under-
mined the foundations ; the rear wall bulged
and cracked, and the galleries "sagged"
from the loosened stones of the interior.
On the streetward side outhouses and other
nuisances had been set close against the
windows. So objectionable was the church
as a place of worship that the better class
of parishioners would not attend divine
service here, and the congregation dimin-
ished steadily, although the population of
the district was increasing rapidly.

Mr. Bronte's successor, the Rev. Mr.

The Haworth of To-day 289

Wade, a man of energy, scholarship, and
refinement, in making public the report of
experts to the effect that the Haworth
church was unsafe, and would have to be
rebuilt from the foundations upward, made
application by letter to hundreds of wealthy
and influential people who had left their
names in the visitors' book kept at the Par-
sonage. Selecting what seemed to him
promising addresses, he wrote out a plain
statement of the dilemma in which he
found himself, and asked for funds with
which to restore the sacred edifice as nearly
as was practicable to the original form,
using the old stones in the erection. The
only donation received for this purpose was
one of thirty pounds from an opulent noble-
man. Meanwhile he was met by a demand
from his own parish for a more commodi-
ous house of worship. Since the ruin must
come down, it was better, reasoned sensi-
ble and interested parties, to provide suit-
ably for the needs of a growing parish,
already too large to be accommodated
within the bounds of the ancient sanctuary.
When the plans of such a church were laid
before the people they raised all the money
required for its construction, one man head-

290 Charlotte Bronte at Home

ing the subscription list with five thousand
pounds.

The tottering walls were levelled to the
ground, the heaving pavement of the floor
was lifted. Under the chancel had been
interred the remains of the family that had
lent distinction to the obscure hamlet. The
dust of father, mother, and six children was
mingling with the common earth, JVlr.
Bronte's coffin being scarcely six inches
underground. The honoured relics were
removed reverently, under Mr. Wade's per-
sonal direction, and placed in a vault
constructed upon the same spot, and her-
metically sealed. A brass plate let into the
floor of the new church designated the
place.

These are incidents unknown to non-
residents of Haworth, and sorely perverted
in the course of the newspaper controversy
provoked by the intelligence of the demoli-
tion of the "Brontes' church." Criticism
yet more caustic followed the addition of
the new wing to the rectory, a dwelling
altogether insufficient in size for the family
that had removed into it. Nobody cares to
recollect, if anybody has troubled himself
to listen to the simple statement, that before

The Haworth of To-day 291

enlarging the dwelling the new incumbent
proposed to sell it, instead, to the clamouring
protestants, that the Bronte relics (then to
be had by the score) might be therein col-
lected and preserved. To employ his own
words, he "was called to this parish to
conserve the highest interests of the church
committed to him, and not to act as the
curator of a museum." If the Bronte ad-
mirers would buy the old Parsonage he
would erect a new one elsewhere. His
proposal met with no response, except in
the form of sentimental protests against the
profanation of a shrine. Nobody raised any
objection to his planting the churchyard
with trees, which have thriven upon the
mouldering mortality beneath.

These are not pleasant details, but I do
not apologise for giving them ; 1 could not
say less. Nevertheless, 1 gladly pass on to
the less gruesome features of my story.

The inability to appreciate the actuality
of present environment on the part of one
who has sought a shrine in the character of
"the passionate pilgrim," is a misfortune
common to sensitive tourists. A notable
exception in my own experience in this re-
spect was the sensation that thrilled me

292 Charlotte Bronte at Home

almost to pain in crossing the worn door-
step where Charlotte must have sat or
stood times without number to see the sun
set and the moon rise, the teeming grave-
yard, overrun with nettles and long grass,
stretching between her and the dark square
tower of the church.

As Emily had trod beside us on our
moorland tramp, so the elder sister whom
the world knows so much better seemed
to glide to my side and accompany me
through the house her genius had con-
secrated.

We were taken, first, into the room at tl\e
right of the entrance, once Mr. Bronte's
study — or den — where he used to hear the
children's lessons, and Branwell's Latin and
Greek ; where he read Jane Eyre on the
critical afternoon of its presentation to him
by the author ; where he bullied his would-
be son-in-law out of reach of patience and
politeness ; where he sat when refusing to
give his daughter "in marriage to this
man."

It is bright now with sunlight which
the windows have been enlarged to admit,
paper of a soft neutral tint conceals the
rough wails, books fill the shelves, and

The Haworth of To-day 293

pictures are set and hung here and there.
It looks like what it is — ^the workroom of
a thoughtful scholar of liberal views and
refined tastes. Yet I could not get away
from the unuttered fancy that a chill had
been left in the air by the old man when he
dropped, like a dead leaf, into his shallow
grave under the church pavement.

Across the hall is the room in which "the
girls " wrote Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights,
Shirley, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and
Villette, the little volume of verse published
tentatively by the trio, and the many verses
written and never printed. This was the
family sitting-room, — the "parlour," — in
which meals were served, and where the
sisters wrote, sewed, studied, and received
their few visitors. It is of fair size, and,
as furnished now, pleasant and cozy.
When scantily fitted up with such articles
as were positively needed for carrying on
the daily routine of domestic life and occu-
pations, bare as to walls and floor, and in-
sufficiently heated by the small grate, it
must have owed whatever it had of cheer
and comfort to the fact that it represented
to the inmates home, and liberty to follow
the pursuits they loved best.

294" Charlotte Bronte at Home

From the children's fireless "study," often
spoken of in our former chapters, we passed
into the "girls' room" adjoining, gazing
there, with bowed heads and full hearts,
upon the spot where stood the "dreary
bed " of Charlotte's next-to-the-Iast letter
to faithful Ellen Nussey.

At a subsequent visit we were admitted
to the heart of the Parsonage-home as it
now is, — a large, cheery, handsome library-
parlour in the wing. At our first call, we
saw none of the Rector's family except
himself. Under his care we returned to
the church, where we had already attended
service that morning. The brass tablet
above the sealed grave under the chancel,
the gift of a stranger-admirer, is lettered,
Emily and Charlotte Bronte. What would
the " brilliant " only son have said and felt
could he have foreseen the omission of his
name from the family roll of honour ? A
fine stained-glass window, inscribed, '" To
the glory of God, and in pleasant memory of
Charlotte Bronte, ' ' was placed in the new
church "by an American citizen," whose
identity is a secret to all but Mr. Wade, —
a secret he has preserved inviolate. Tablets
commemorative of the rest of the Bronte

The Haworth of To-day ■ 295

household interred within the sanctuary are
let into the wall near the door.

In the lobby we were shown the mar-
riage register of Arthur Bell Nicholls and
Charlotte Bronte. Until Mr. Wade inter-
fered to protect it by locking up the pre-
cious volume in the safe, of which he keeps
the key, the record was seen and handled
by every sight-seer, and as a result Char-
lotte's signature, the last she penned of her
maiden name, is shockingly bethumbed
and soiled. Both parties to the contract
are said in the register to be " of full age " ;
Mr. Nicholls's father is written down "a
farmer," Mr. Bronte as "clerk."

I bought a photograph of Mr. Nicholls
from a Haworth man whose shop is hard
by the church. The face had a decided
Milesian tast, and, to my disappointed eyes,
wore a smug, pragmatical look.

"It is a fairish likeness," the "old resi-
dent " assured me. " He is an Irishman,
you know, and is still living — near Dublin,
I think. Hers is a better likeness," desig-
nating the picture we have learned to know
by heart, the thin, shy face, redeemed from
absolute plainness by the glorious eyes.
"Recollect her? I've lived here, as man

296 Charlotte Bronte at Home

and boy, all my life, and seen her thou-
sands of times. I saw her married. None
of us ever dreamed that any of them would
come to be famous, unless it was the son.
He was the cleverest lad I ever knew, and
the best company in the world. He could
have been anything he chose if he had con-
ducted himself differently. We were sur-
prised that she became distinguished, she
was so quiet and reserved. The old Parson
had some queer ways with him. He al-
ways slept with his pistols by him, and
they were never far away from him. A
few days before he died he was handling
one, and found his finger was too weak to
pull back the trigger. So 1, being handy
that way, was sent for to make a lever that
would work it. As a family they kept very
much to themselves ; but if it had n't been
for them, Haworth would never have been
heard of. Mrs. Brown, the old servant
'Martha,' who lived so long with them,
died several years ago."

Mr. Wade's disinclination to receive
within the rectory the throng of sight-seers
who troop thither from all parts of the
world has been the subject of animadver-
sion as virulent as that called forth by the

The Haworth of To-day 297

alterations in church and parsonage. When
one pauses to reflect that the annual visit-
ation used to be numbered by thousands,
and still mounts up into the hundreds, that
the Rector is a busy man and a studious,
conscientious in the discharge of parochial
and domestic duties, and that even a clergy-
man is supposed to have some of the rights
of a private citizen to hold his home as his
castle, the present incumbent of Haworth
may be less bitterly censured for declining
to grant the run of his premises to the
curious and the sentimental public.

For ourselves, we frankly owned that
exclusion, even of reverent pilgrims, ought
not to be construed into discourtesy ; and
the knowledge of his scruples and general
practice in this respect made us appreciate
the more gratefully the hospitable invita-
tion to visit the sacred precincts.

We said our grateful farewells to him
upon the hollowed threshold of his front
door — the gray, old stone sill which, by
some occult process, brought the "tiny,
delicate, serious little lady, pale, with fair,
straight hair and steady eyes," to our spirit-
ual vision more vividly than anything else
about the house had done, — and bent

298 Charlotte Bronte at Home

our steps thoughtfully back to the Black
Bull.

In the warm noon sunshine, a robin was
singing in the laurestinus and golden-holly
trees fringing the sunny side of the church ;
above, the sky was blue and smiling as a
baby's eyes ; out on the moors the wind
blew fresh and strong ; the swallows flew
low, and in sheltered hollows the late-
blossoming heather looked fearlessly up to
Heaven.

INDEX

Ambleside, 224
Arnold, Dr., 225
Arnold, Matthew, 221

B

Beck, Madame, 142, 149

Bell, Acton, 40, 184, 195, 196

Bell, Currer, 184, 185, 189, 190, 193, 195, 196,255, 265

Bell, Ellis, 40, 184, 195

Bell, Miss, 278

" Black Bull, The," 92-94, 105, 181, 202, 280, 284, 298

Bradford, 2, 3, 8, 11, 106

Bradford Church, 252

Branty, 3

Branwell, Elizabeth, 35-38, 41, 44, 50, 57, 59, 72, 82,
84, 94, 102, 114, 130, 132, 146, 147, 151, 166, 220

Branwell, Maria, 4, 6, 8, 33

Bronte, Anne, 11, 19, 31, 32, 38, 40, 58, 59, 62-64,
82,88,95,97, 105, 109, no, 114, 117, 118, 125,
130, 132, 147, 153, i66, 169-173, 180, 183, 190,
299

^00 Index

Bronte, Anne— Continued

'93-'95, 197. 203, 205-207, 212, 213, 215,216,
236, 237

Bronte, Branwell, 10, 19, 33, 40, 58, 59, 62, 64, 67, 71,
90,92-96, 104, 106, 114, 116-119, 126, 128, 133,
•47, '48, 15', '53, '66, 167, 169, 173-179, 185,
190, 193, 199, 202, 203, 230, 292, 296

Bronte, Charlotte, birth, baptism, and removal from
Thornton to Haworth, 1-13 ; mother's illness, se-
cluded and strange childhood, 14-27 ; mother's
death ; home education under aunt and father; preco-
cious children, 28-40 ; Cowan Bridge (" Lowood "),
privation and suffering; Maria Bronte as "Helen
Burns", 41-53; deaths of Maria and Elizabeth;
Charlotte's return to her parsonage home, 54-65 ;
Miss Wooler's school ; introduction to Mary Taylor
and Ellen Nussey, 66-81 ; Charlotte leaves school ;
studies and employments at home ; brother and
sisters, 82-96 ; governess-ship at Roe Head ; Emily
Bronte at home and at school ; literary aspirations ;
Robert Southey's advice, 97-1 13; Dewsbury Moor ;
nervous prostration and convalescence; "The
Bronte Group " in the Parsonage ; first offer of mar-
riage; second governess-ship ; parish work, 1 14-128 ;
third governess-ship; project of home-school ; Char-
lotte and Emily in Brussels, 1 29- 1 46 ; Miss Bran-
well's death and will ; Branwell's failures as tutor,
clerk, and artist ; Madame Heger-; Chariotte's sec-
ond year in Brussels, 147-162 ; home-school aban-
doned ; Mr. Bronte's blindness ; Branwell's shameful
story, 163-182; first volume published; "Our
book is found to be a drug " ; The Professor's ill
fortune ; Jane Eyre written and published ; great suc-
cess ; visit to London publishers, 183-108 ; Bran-

Index 301

Bronte, Cliarlotte — Continued

well's death; Emily's illness and death, 199-211 ;
Anne's rapid decline and her death at Scarboro';
Charlotte's lonely life in Haworth ; Shirley written
and published, 2 12-226 ; iVlr, James Taylor's unsuc-
cessful suit; yUlette written; signal success; London
friends and distinguished acquaintances, 227-239 ;
Mr. NichoUs's faithful attachment to Charlotte and
Mr. Bronte's opposition ; betrothal, 240-258 ; mar-
riage ; the new and peaceful life ; illness and death,
259-278 ; visit to the Haworth of to-day ; Emily's
Moors; the Parsonage; Rev. Mr. Wade; "The
Black Bull ", 279-298

Bronte, Elizabeth, 19, 33, 48, 62, 203

Bronte, Emily Jane, 11, 19, 22, 38, 40, 48, 57, 62, 64,
82,88, 90, 91, 95-100, 102, 103, 107, 109, 110,
114, 117, 118, 124, 127, 130, 132, 137, 138, 140,
141, 143, 145, 147. '53, "54, 163,165-168, 179,

180, 183, 190, 1Q2, 201,203-207,209, 210, 2M,
215, 216, 264, 284, 292, 294

Bronte, Maria, 5, 16, 18, 19, 29, j), 38, 39, 40, 46, 47,
55-59, 63, 164, 203

Bronte, Mrs., 5, 7, 13, 16, 18, 21, 25, 31, 36

Bronte Museum, 70, 263

Bronte, Rev. Patrick, 3-5, 8-11, 13-15, 18, 22, 24, 26,
29, 3°, 32, 35, 37-39, 42-44, 50. '57, 60, 66, 70,
72,83,90,94,95, 104, 116, 134, 148, 166, 186,
228, 229, 240, 243, 244, 247-250, 252, 256, 257,
277, 286-288, 290, 292, 295

Bronte Walk, 284

Bronte Waterfall, 270, 284

Brontes, Irish, 4

Brontes, The, 5, 13, 117, 128, iqi, 144, 190, 262, 282,

294

■^02 Index

Brookroyd, 76, 105, 152, 173, 233, 261, 268-270
Brown, Martha, 206, 219, 243, 247, 263, 265, 272, 277,

296
Brussels, 131-135, 143, 152, 154, 156-158, 160, 163-

165, 171, 273, 283
Burlington, 130
"Burns, Helen," 46, 51, 58

C
Cambridge, 3
Carlisle, Lord, 234
Clapham, Mr. and Mrs., 274
Coleridge, Samuel, 91
Conway, 265
Cornhill Magapne, 275
Cornwall, 4, 21

Cowan Bridge, 42, 45, 47, 48, 50, ■54, 56-58, 64, 66,
68, 79, 101

De Garrs, Nancy, 16, 34

De Garrs, Sarah, 16, 17, 20, 2^, 24, 20, 28, 52, 54, 97,

loi, 262
Dewsbury Moor, 106, 110, 114, 151, 1^2
Dobell, Sydney, 223
"Donne, Mr.," 128
Dublin, 295

Earnley Rectory, 129
" Emma," 275
Emmanuel, Paul, 139, 160

Index 303

Eyre, Jane. 48, 51, 59, 80, 187, 189, 190, 193, 195, 221,
2^Q, 253, 275, 283, 2Q2, 293

Fennell, Jane, 8, 10
Fennell, John, 10, 21
Filey, 242

Gaskell, Mrs., 12, 18, 38, 39,45,46,48, 54, 58, 76, 8s,
97, 101, 107, 144, 158, ISO, 175-178, 194, 198,
209, 222, 233, 234, 259, 263, 272, 285

Gawthorpe, 271

Grant, Mr., 128, 250, 251,

Grey, Agnes, 190, 195, 223, 224

Grundy, Francis, 151, 174, 202

Halifax, 107, 1 10, 114

Hartshead, 3, 30

Haworth Church, 13, 60, 286

Haworth, Parsonage of, 12, 14, 60, 68, iS2, 246, 247,
250, 256, 257, 259, 260, 268, 276, 277, 281, 282,
287, 291, 294, 296

Haworth Rectory, 98, 286

Haworth, Town of, 10-12, 16, 42, 54, 65, 73, 82, 83, 85,
87, 88, 103, 105, no, 114, 117, 125, 132, 137, 150,
152^ 153, 165, 168, 171, 223, 246-248, 251-253,
255, 266, 268, 279, 280, 282, 286, 287, 290, 295

Haworth, Vicar of, 25, 246

Heger, Madame, 134, 135, 139, 142, 144, 154, 156-
159, 165

304 Index

Heger, Monsieur, 134, 139, 140, 141, 143, 144, 153-155,

161, 165, 168, 172
Hegers, The, 134
" Helstone, Caroline,'' 44. 75-77
Hewitt, iVlrs., 274
Hewitt, Richard, iv
Huddersfield, 3, 105

Ingham Hall, 1 18

" Ingram, Blanche," 283

Ireland, 266, 278

"John, Dr.," 283
Johnson, Samuel, 81

K

" Keeldar, Captain," 127

Keeper, 98, 103, 207, 209, 215, 235, 264

Keighley, 195

Kingston, Elizabeth, 148

Kirklees, 73

Kirk-Smeaton, 252

Koekelberg, Chateau de, 134, 145

Leeds, 3, 42, 66, 73, 93, 126, 259
Lewes, George Henry, 221
Lille, 1 3 3

"Linton, Catherine," 283
Lister, Mr. Accepted, 9

Index 305

London, 95, 95, 105, 133, 134, 219, 233, 234, 280
" Lowood," 51, 55

M

" Macarthy, Mr.,'' 242, 255

"Malone, Mr.," 128, 166, 241

Martineau, Miss Han'iet, 219, 220, 224, 225

Milnes, Monckton, 234

" Moore, Robert," 283

Morgan, Mrs., 1 1

Morgan, Rev. William, 8, 1 1

N

Nelson, Lord, 4

Newsome, Mrs., iv, 18, 262

NiclioUs, Arthur Bell, 240-253, 255-238, 260-263, 265-
272, 277, 278, 295

Nussey, Ellen, 74, 75, 77-79, 84-86, 88, 95, 105-107,
115, 118, 119, 121, 123, 130, 133, 139, 150, 151,
155, 156, 164, 167, 171, 173, 176, 179, '82, 189,
190, 197, 205, 207, 213-21";, 217, 218, 224, 225,
229, 236, 238, 240, 245, 244, 251, 254, 257, 260,
261, 265-268, 272, 274, 294

Nussey, Henry, 120, 122, 127, 129

Nusseys, The, 1 16

O

O'Prunty, 3

P

Penzance, 4, 21, 82, 148

Professor, The, 135, 136, 154, 156. 186, 187, 189, 264

3o6

Index

Q

Quincey,

Thomas de,

184

R

Reuter, Mile. Zaraide, 159

Ritchie, Mrs., 253

Road, Old Denholme, 2

Robinson, Miss Mary F., 138, 152, 179, 201

Robinson, Mrs., 174, 175, 177-179

Robinson, Rev. Mr., 166, 174, 176, 178

" Rochester, Mr.," 283

Roe Head, 73, 74, 76, 77, 84, ^d, 103, 105, 106

Rue d'lsabelle, 134, 159, 167

Scarboro', 214, 236, 242

" Scatcherd, Miss,'' 47

Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 81

Shirley, i, 44, 73, 98, 99, 127, 138, 145, 166, 215, 219,

227, 239, 241, 242, 281, 283, 293
Shorter, Professor Clement K., iii, 4, 19, 67, 116, 135,

148, 162, 232, 247, 252, 255, 258, 274, 278
Shuttleworth, Lady Kay, 222
Shuttleworth, Sir James Kay, 222, 268
Shuttleworths, The Kay, 270, 271
Sidgewick, Mr., 118, 129
Sidgewicks, The, 120
Smith and Elder, 189, 193, 194, 196, 227
Smith, Mr., 196, 197, 223
Smiths, The, 198, 219
"Snowe, Lucy," 135
Southey, Robert, 109, no, 112-114

Index 307

Stonegappe, 118, 129
"Sweeting, Mr.," 127, 128
Swinburne, Algernon, 223
Sympson, Mr., 283

" Tabby, Our," 60, 84, 99, 103, 114, 124,218,219,243,

272
" Tartar," 98, 91)

Taylor, Martha, 74, 116, 134, 144, 155
Taylor, Mary, 74, 75, 79, 80, 87, 97, 1 16, 131-134, 144,

'55
Taylor, Mr. James, 227-232
Taylors, The, 105, 116
"Temple, Miss," 48
Tenant of IVildfell Hall, The, 195, 293
Thackeray, William Makepeace, 219, 222, 234, 253,

275, 276
Thornton, 1-4, 8-12, 16, 30, 117
Thornton, Bell Chapel of, 13
Thorp Green, 166, 169, 170, 174, 178

U

Upperwood House, 121

V

VilUtte, 135, 139, 142, 154, 156, 159, i86, 235, 238,
283, 293

W

Wade, Rev. J., iv, 289, 290, 295, 296

Weatherfield, 3

Weightman, Rev. William, 126, 127, 151, 166, 241

3o8 Index

Wellington, Duke of, 39, 62, 221

Wheelwright, Miss Lsetitia, 159, 161, 273, 277

White, Mr., 129, 130

White, Mrs., 130

Williams, W. S., 189, 194, 196, 214, 226, 227, 234, 238

Windermere, 222

Wood, Mr., 69, 71

Wood, Mrs., 71

Wooler, Miss Margaret, 73-75, 78, 82, 96, 105, 106,

109, 115, 126, 131, 132, 235, 260-262, 265
Wordsworth, William, 91, 92
IVuthering Heights, 101, 190, 195, 202, 223, 293

" Yorke, Jessie," 74, 144
"Yorke, Martin," 74, 134
"Yorke, Rose," 74, 87
Yorkes, The, 74

Yorkshire, 4, 15, j6, 69, 92, 118, 134, 219, 220, 280,
282

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Charlotte Bronte at home.

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